Fresh off the press, I got my stack of the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing.” Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d be lucky enough to get this far.
(NOTE: I’m still on break for a bit, but I needed to break the seal on the blog because a) some of you are already back at the classroom grind and b) I promised Sage I’d let people know what’s up with the textbooks I’m doing. I’ll probably pick up again after a week or so, or whenever the pinball machine I’m working on really ticks me off… — VFF)
THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS NECESSARY: I got home last night to find a heavy box on the porch from Sage. Inside were my author copies of the third edition of “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing,” which pressed over the holiday break.
I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you out there for, as Yogi Berra once put it, making this edition necessary. Somewhere along the way, you all made a choice to give me and this book a chance, and for that, I’ll be forever grateful. I know it’s not easy changing books for a class, adopting a new textbook or assigning any textbook in today’s “Textbooks are the overpriced devil, man…” world.
My goal in every textbook is to practice what I preach: Focus on audience-centricity. I want you and your students to get a ton out of these books and I want to make sure I never lose sight of who is out there and what you want/need out of me.
(The second goal is to adhere to my Polish-Catholic roots of feeding you as much as humanly possible. Whether it’s pierogi or information, we’re going to stuff you to the gills. Thus, the book updates and the blog: If you need ANYTHING I didn’t cover, tell me and it’s going up on the blog.)
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT THIS EDITION: Well, for starters, the cover is wicked cool… OK, maybe I’m the only one who cares about that. Let’s look into this a bit:
Artificial intelligence: This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room these days when it comes to anything having to do with content creation. Chapter 2 has been completely revamped to deal with how best to think about AI, what it’s good for in terms of media and why we aren’t ready to let RoboCop 2 take the keyboards out of our hands. In addition, more on AI and critically thinking about it are infused in the remainder of the chapters. We do more than a broad overview, instead focusing on how the tools can benefit you in the field and what you need to watch out for.
Audience Centricity:Not only has Chapter 1 gotten a refresh, but the rest of the book has gotten some additional elements that will help you figure out how best to use media tools to reach your audience, whatever that audience may be. Now, more than ever, we see shifts in what social media platforms can do, how news outlets provide content and who pays attention to our work. To make sure we’re all doing the best we can, we need to know who we’re trying to serve, what they want from us and how they prefer to receive it. Chapter 1 gives you the goods on the first part of that sentence, while the remaining chapters focus on the latter two parts.
Thoughts from a Pro:We have some of our tried-and-true pros back to offer their thoughts on what you need to know and why you need it, as well as some fresh faces with some new ideas. In addition, each pro gives us a few thoughts they have on AI as it relates to their work and the field as a whole. That should be helpful in demonstrating how significant (or maybe insignificant) AI is in various parts of the field, along with suggestions from professionals as to how best to use it.
Legal Wranglings: The law has been changing quite a bit (and apparently will continue to change in the upcoming few years), so keeping media operations on the right side of the law continues to be an ongoing challenge. With fresh examples and updates to legal outcomes, we give you a look at where things tend to stand in regard to reporting and writing as of this publication. (And I’m sure by the time I’m done writing this post, TikTok will be dead, brought back, challenged again and killed again like Jason Voorhees, so that’s why we have the blog…)
More goodies: As always, Sage is a treasure trove of add-ons and extra stuff for every book I do. The folks there have tons of lecture stuff, PowerPoints, test banks, exercises and more at the ready beyond what I’ve put into the book and the blog.
If you are interested in getting access to the new edition (digital, print or otherwise), along with all the extra stuff Sage has added, feel free to hit me up through the contact page or go directly to Staci Wittek at: staci.wittek@sagepub.com
She is truly the best person I’ve ever worked with in terms of sales and marketing and generally being awesome at book stuff.
But wait, there’s more…
TIME TO GET (MEDIA) LIT(ERATE): Back in August, “Exploring Mass Communication” hit the market, once again proving I either have too much time on my hands or I’m too stupid to say no to a project. In any case, this intro-level textbook turned into what I would like to say is the best book I’ve done to date.
I get the best mail from Sage…
This book is GREAT for any introduction to mass media/mass com class, but it’s even BETTER if you’re trying to teach media literacy to a nation of freshmen and sophomores. I didn’t realize that until someone told me, “Hey, why did you tell me you wrote a media-literacy text?” Turns out, it’s become popular in all sorts of classes for a number of reasons:
It’s cheaper than the other leading brand: In going through 128 reviews Sage sent me, I realized that the only thing all 128 reviewers agreed on was that price was a factor. I asked Sage if I could just write whatever I wanted if we re-titled the book: “Filak’s Five Dollar Book of Mass Com Stuff.” The answer was a hard “no,” but we did get the print edition to come in below other books like it. Even BETTER, the rental costs for digital copies are less than one-third of the cost of the print edition (especially if you go through Sage reps) and then there’s an even BETTER version of this….
The Vantage Advantage: “Nobody reads textbooks,” is what I keep hearing from instructors, who are actually desperate to get students to read the stuff in the book. Sage has built an entire digital system called Vantage that can plug into your Learning Management System (BlackBoard, Canvas, D2L or whatever people are calling it) so you can assign kids stuff digitally, track their efforts and generally oversee the class like the guy in “Sliver.” In addition, you can toggle how you want to spot-check the kids on their reading. There are quiz questions attached to various sections of the readings and other analytics that help you help them to learn. Even better? It’s cheaper than a print book. By a lot.
If you’re interested in giving this book a look, feel free to hit me up through the contact page or go directly to Staci Wittek at: staci.wittek@sagepub.com
This leads us to the upcoming edition of “Dynamics of Media Writing.” The “OG” book in the “Dynamics” series is in process as we speak. The goal is to have it to a copy editor by February, proofs done by April and out the door by August of this year. As is the case with the Reporting book, there will be AI additions, new pros and a ton of extra stuff. I’ll keep you posted as we go.
Thanks again for all of this. Without you all, these books would be dead after one edition and serving as a coffee coaster in the grad-student lounge.
I don’t know what compelled you to castigate the media at large in that press conference. It might have been just the stress of the day or it might have been previous experiences with a few bad folks in the field. I can tell you for sure that, just like in politics, there are good and bad people in journalism. And, just like in politics, the lousy ones tend to make the biggest impressions and do the most damage for the whole lot of folks. If I had to wager, I’d say that most of the people in that media cluster would have gladly been covering ANYTHING ELSE that day than a school shooting.
I let this post sit for a day or two, in the hopes that you would issue some sort of apology for this, even if it were completely insincere, so that we could all go back to doing what we’re good at: Media folks covering the news, you not pretending to be a journalism expert. Unfortunately, the PR people who advise you are apparently no better than you are, so I thought I’d offer a few insights on what this situation is like for news people.
I spent three years as a reporter, another five as an editor and then about 15 as a newsroom adviser, and in every case, I’ve had to deal with stories involving dead kids. This is not a morbid flex, but rather a chance to help you understand where I’m coming from.
All those things you said at the press conference? Hell, I’ve been told worse and more loudly by far more traumatized people than you. I’ve been called a vulture, a scumbag, a waste of life and a few other things that could peel the paint off of a car. The hardest one was the lady who told me that “Your mother must not have raised you right, if you think what you’re doing is appropriate.”
Believe it or not, journalists are actually human. Sure, we’re really good at hiding it a lot, but we have the same emotional range as most other bipeds you’ve encountered. If you felt pain, agony, shock, angst or anything along those lines, it’s safe to say that the people who were asking questions of you that day did as well.
If you think that reporters in that gaggle are going to enjoy talking to sobbing parents and bothering traumatized kids before heading home for a nice casserole supper, you’re delusional. This kind of thing sticks with most people for a long time, and journalists are no exception.
When my students would ask me about my experiences writing about death and mayhem, I told them that I could remember the name, age and cause of death of every dead kid I ever covered. It’s been decades since I was reporting and editing, but it’s still true.
Casey Rowin, Shawn Magrane, Matthew Dunn, Deanna Turner… those names and a dozen more stick with me every day. I think about Rachael Himmelberg, the infant who died after receiving what should have been life-saving open heart surgery. She would be in her late 20s now and I wonder what she would be doing. I think of Jordan Sosa, who died at 22 months old when he wandered out of his grandparents’ house and fell into the Black Earth Creek. He might have been a college student of mine, if he hadn’t drown that day.
My first year at Ball State, we had five college kids die of various causes: Michael McKinney was shot to death by a cop, Karl Harford was robbed and executed after giving some guys a ride… accidents, suicides and more… I remember one of the more veteran editors of the paper, who had lived in Muncie his entire life telling me, “This is not normal for us around here…” like he was trying to convince both of us that what he was saying was true.
The editor also asked me, “How did you get so good at covering stuff like this?”
My answer was simple and I think most journalists would be on board with it: “You don’t get good at doing this. You become more experienced in doing the best you can. If you ever get to a point where you feel you’re good at covering dead kids, it means you are really broken and you need to walk away for a good, long while.”
Each dead kid we cover is like a wound we receive, the scar a permanent reminder of what it was to be there in the worst moment of someone else’s life. Each mistake we made in how we phrased a question or how we approached a source still stings. Each time we did the best we could and still faced the wrath of a pained family member or friend brings about a wince and grimace.
You mentioned that reporters should go away and give people a chance to grieve. Despite your apparent thoughts on the state of media today, reporters can be a crucial component of that grieving process. I go back to what Kelly Furnas, the adviser of student media at Virginia Tech, said to his students as they went out to cover what remains the deadliest shooting on a college campus:
“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,’” Furnas said, recalling that day at a college media conference a few months after the shooting. “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.”
I can tell you for sure that this holds water. When it came to the dead people I covered in one way or another, I got one of three reactions 99% of the time:
“I just can’t… I’m sorry…” These people were already at the maximum level of stress and pain and they were just incapable of dealing with anything else at that point. I would apologize for intruding on their grief and then leave them alone.
“You #%*%ing VULTURE!”Yep, we talked about that already. This reaction gave me a ton of anxiety and pain, but I understood. It was like putting your hand out toward a wounded animal: They just hurt so badly, they lashed out, regardless of your intent. Again, I’d apologize and back away.
“The pressure-release valve” This is what Kelly was talking about. These people are so full of emotion and they have nowhere to go with it. Everyone around them is feeling the same pain, misery, stress and more… All they want to do is talk about how great their kid was, or how amazing their parent was or whatever stories make them feel less hurt. As a journalist, we’re that opportunity to not only help, but to share their thoughts with others.
So in the future, please feel free not to tell journalists how to do their jobs at a time like this. It’s a job nobody wants, no one revels in and few people can do and remain unscathed.
If someone asks a particularly crappy question like, “Are there plans to call it ‘Less-Abundant Life’ now that people have died there?” or “Don’t you find it ironic that there was a lot of thoughts and prayers happening in there but the kids still got shot?” go ahead and release your inner scold. That kind of person deserves your wrath.
However, the basic “5Ws and 1H” questions are normal, even if the situation is not and you lack the answers. Everyone is frayed to the nth degree, so you need to operate above the fray. If you can’t, don’t hold the press conference or send someone out there who is actually skilled at PR to do the work for you.
I hope this helps, because I somehow doubt this will be the last time you and the media will spend time together discussing a devastating death or two.
And then today, we got a nice report from the Board of Regents meeting in which apparently 30% of all programs are “under-enrolled.” Although the auditors haven’t called for these programs to be killed, they have recommended the system “take a more active role in managing programs.” Ugh…
It never seems like we’re going to manage, and yet somehow we do. Each day seems like a week until the end of the semester somehow arrives in a flurry of activity and a moment of incredulity:
With that in mind, I’ll take whatever win I can get, as I watch my classes finish off their final exams. Many of them are turning stuff in with a, “Hey… That wasn’t that hard… I think I learned something…” look on their faces, which is nice. I hope you all feel that way as well with your kids
We’re taking the traditional semester break, with a goal of having some good things to blog about and some news about the forthcoming editions of your favorite (I hope) textbooks.
(The system says, “We would never look to diminish your rights or take your hard-earned work away from you.” What the system actually does is more accurately depicted in the scene above.)
If you think this is as stupid as I do, please email system President Jay Rothman at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him not to let this policy pass.
THE LONGER, MORE NUANCED VERSION: Here’s a deep dive on the way the system is trying to recreate its copyright policy in a way that disenfranchises its faculty:
The UW System is proposing a new copyright policy that professors say would eliminate faculty ownership of instructional materials. The revisions are stoking alarm among professors statewide who say such a move would cheapen higher education into a mass-produced commodity.
“This policy change is nothing less than a drastic redefinition of the employment contract, one that represents a massive seizing of our intellectual property on a grand scale,” professors from nine of the 13 UW campuses wrote in a recent letter to UW System President Jay Rothman. “It would allow any UW campuses to fire any employee and nonetheless continue teaching their courses in perpetuity with no obligation to continue paying the employee for their work.”
Aside from owning faculty syllabi, lecture notes and exam materials, UW would also have ownership rights over the scholarship faculty create:
A draft of the new policy, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, would eliminate existing copyright language and replace it with the assertion that UW System holds ownership of both “institutional work” and “scholarly work.”
<SNIP>
“Scholarly work” includes most of what professors produce, such as lecture notes, course materials, journal articles and books. The UW System transfers copyright ownership to the author, as is customary in higher education, but notes that it “reserves” the right to use the works for purposes “consistent with its educational mission and academic norms.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Given that I’ve got about a dozen textbooks in the field, I edit a journal that needs scholarly work to keep it running, I spent seven years crafting hundreds of blog posts and that I’ve built a ton of courses over my nearly 30 years of teaching, this was basically my calm, metered reaction:
I’ve already sent a copy of the proposal to Sage for its team of lawyers to go over, so I’m hopeful that I receive an answer along the lines of, “Calm down… Have a Diet Coke… This isn’t going to destroy what you’ve spent decades creating…”
In the meantime, let’s lay out how stupid and problematic this is:
The quality of your courses depend on the people you’re pissing off: We essentially went through this in my media-writing class today and a collection of sophomores and juniors understood it, so I’m hoping it might make sense to the Board of Regents.
I proposed the following scenario to one kid in the class: Let’s say you turned in a really good story as an assignment for this class. In fact, I thought it was so good, I took your name off of it, put my name on it and submitted it to the local paper. The paper then paid me $50 for the story.
I then asked the kid, “So, given that every time you turn in something good, I’m going to take it, put my name on it and make money from it, how likely are you to put forth your best effort in this class?”
The kid said, “There’s no way I’m going to do anything good for you anymore.”
Right. So, let’s play that out here: If every time I work REALLY hard on making good stuff for my class, the U is just going to claim it as its own, why would I bother to do anything more than the bare minimum to make my class work?
I guess you could make the argument that pride in our work and a desire to make things better for our students could inspire us to do great things, even in the face of a naked power grab by the system, but if you’re going to treat us like mercenaries, we’re going to behave that way.
This will stifle innovation, limit interest in developing new courses and create a general sense of animosity among faculty. It will also likely inspire professors to find new ways to hide stuff from the administration folks, as one person on social media suggested to me:
This stuff isn’t a product, but rather a process: Inherent to the system’s argument is the basic premise of work product: You built this stuff while you were employed by us and required to do so. Therefore, since we paid you for this, the stuff is ours.
That works in the private sector, where we’re tasked with specific outcomes and granted special provisions to create this kind of work product. For example, I know that when I worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, I wrote a lot of articles that the paper published. Implicit in my employment agreement was the premise that I was acting on behalf of the paper, writing things that the paper tasked me to write and publishing those things in a copyrighted publication. They own that stuff and I’m cool with that. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to republish a weather story I wrote in 1996, and if I did something cool I wanted to show my students, that’s acceptable use.
However, when it comes to my media-writing class, I didn’t get hired to write lecture notes and syllabi for that class. In fact, what I wrote was a tweaked version of something I’d been working on for decades. I’d drafted some of this conceptual stuff when I was working at UW-Madison, improved upon it when I was at Mizzou, reconfigured it at Ball State and then adapted it here. This isn’t like you hired me to bake a cake for your birthday. This is a tree I’ve been growing and tending for years and years.
The material might not be UW’s to steal: Even if you don’t buy the argument above, the instructors might not own the material they’re using in the first place.
Textbook publishers aren’t just sending out desk copies of a dead-tree books and telling fledgling professors, “Vaya con Dios.” They actually build a ton of back-end stuff into the educational packages they provide these days, which includes a lot of the stuff the system is trying to get its grubby little paws on.
I know for my books at Sage, we have sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides for lectures, notes for instructors, exercises and test banks crammed with questions. I might even be forgetting some of the stuff we provide.
(Shameless Plug: Sage really is amazing when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you ever need a book, check these folks out first, especially if you need some help with the shaping and molding of the entire class experience.)
These things are available to instructors because Sage built them to go along with the authors’ textbooks. The professors can use them as they are, add stuff, cut stuff or otherwise tweak what they receive. That said, it’s not theirs to sell or give away. Sage holds the copyright for this stuff and I imagine Sage and the other book publishers who pour a ton of time and resources into building these things would be more than a bit peeved if the UW System tried to claim it as its own.
The Coy and Vance Duke Theory of Education: When I was a kid, I loved “The Dukes of Hazzard” television show, which ran every Friday for about seven or eight years. The show involved two cousins, Bo and Luke Duke, getting into scrapes with the corrupt law enforcement of Hazzard County and doing amazing car chases in their 1969 Dodge Charger. Along with patriarch Uncle Jesse Duke and the lovely cousin Daisy Duke, the boys were “makin’ their way, the only way they know how,” to quote the theme song.
It was a simple show that drew a good audience and it seemed to work well. However, around the fifth season, John Schneider and Tom Wopat (who played Bo and Luke, respectively) got into a contract dispute with the studio over salaries. Rather than pay them and move on with life, the studio had the idea in its head that the car (the General Lee) was actually the star of the show, so it didn’t matter who was driving it and that they didn’t need these two pretty boys at all.
If ever there was a knock-off of a brand name, this was it. Like the original Duke Boys, one was blonde, one was brunette. They essentially wore the same wardrobe, had the same catch phrases and did the same insane driving stuff. That said, the ratings took a dump and after one season, Bo and Luke “returned from driving the NASCAR circuit” and Coy and Vance ended up fading from memory.
What the universities are doing here is essentially the same kind of thing. They figure, “Well, hell, if we have the notes, the syllabus and the PowerPoint slides, we don’t really need the professor who created them at the front of the room.” These folks assume that once we decide to leave, retire or whatever, they can just plug in an adjunct at a fraction of the cost and things will run like a Swiss watch. And that’s not just me being paranoid, as other folks see it as well:
I pretty much know my notes aren’t going to be helpful to other people as I wrote them based on a lot of my experiences in the field. Notes like (BUS FIRE STORY GOES HERE) or (EXPLAIN DRUG DEALER SHOT THING) probably won’t work for a random Coy or Vance they bring in to teach my class after they decide they don’t need me anymore.
HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD CARE (AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT): One of the biggest reasons I’m worried about this is because it impacts what I can do with my materials. That’s also the main reason why I think you should care about it, too.
I never took this job to get rich and I certainly don’t like the idea of coming across like Daffy Duck when he found the treasure room:
However, when I know stuff is mine to do with as I please, that tends to benefit a lot of other people as well. Whenever someone shoots me an email and says, “Hey, how do you organize your class?” I’m always happy to give them a copy of my syllabus. When someone needs an assignment I’ve built, I’m glad to share it with them or on the blog.
When we went into COVID lock down, I basically dumped everything I ever did that I thought would help people into the Corona Hotline section of the blog for free. All those goodies remain there to this day, so feel free to help yourself.
If this policy passes, I might not be as free to offer that kind of generosity any more, and that would really tick me off.
So, here’s how you can help me remain capable of helping you. The university system has extended comments on this until Dec. 13. If you are part of the UW system, you can use this link for sure to register your thoughts. (Not sure if it works for those of you elsewhere.)
If you can’t use that link, here is another option:
This is Jay Rothman, the president of the Universities of Wisconsin system. Feel free to call him at the number above or email him at president@wisconsin.edu and tell him to leave the copyright in the hands of the professors, instructors and students.
I appreciate the help and I’m sure my colleagues throughout the system do as well.
THE LEAD: Social media users and microbloggers found their tipping point when it came to the way in which X (formerly Twitter) was turning into a hell-scape. In the wake of the election, millions of users have shut down their X accounts and moved to one of several other sites that offered relatively the same services as X, but without the trolling and content manipulation.
Bluesky, a fledgling social media platform, reported Thursday that 1 million users had signed up in a single day. Some frustrated X users appear to have flocked to the newer network in recent weeks.
Bluesky, which began as an internal project by then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019, was invitation-only until it opened to the public in February. Since 2021, it has been an independent company with Jay Graber as its CEO.
It currently has about 18 million users. Graber posted Friday that the platform is growing by 10,000 users every 10 to 15 minutes.
While Bluesky remains small compared to established online spaces, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood and less influenced by X owner Elon Musk, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump.
BACKGROUND: Alternatives like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and others have existed on the fringes of microblogging sites for several years, but never managed to gain traction. Twitter/X had the benefit of being one of the earliest sites of this nature, which meant that most people interested in this form of social media had developed significant followings there.
It’s unclear as to how many users have left X since the election of Donald Trump, with whom X owner Elon Musk has aligned himself. While the argument that X has become too toxic and conspiratorial is an oft-stated reason for leaving, the massive exodus also tended to coincide with Musk’s update to the service agreement:
A new terms of service document, which took effect on Nov. 15, allows Musk to use tweets, photos and videos — even from private accounts — to train Grok, the platform’s AI bot.
“You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide … for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type,” the terms say under the section about users’ rights.
They also stipulate that users’ content may be modified or adapted for other media.
Users will not be paid for their content, which could end up in the hands of other companies, organizations or individuals.
The company will not monitor posts for truthfulness.
“You may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive,” the terms say. “All Content is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content.”
If you are moved/moving to Bluesky, post your addy down in the comments or send it to me via the Contact Page and I’ll build us a starter kit.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:Social media has always been a shifting landscape in which almost anything can (and usually does) happen. Over the past 15-20 years, there have been very few platforms that have remained a standard bearer for this form of communication. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter were kind of the Fab Four in that regard.
I’ve been watching social media for years, in large part because I’ve been writing books that have chapters on it and I hate looking dated or stupid. When I first had to write the draft of the “Dynamics of Media Writing,” the folks at Sage had me write the social media chapter first as part of the “pitch” they wanted to send to potential adopters.
I protested, arguing that it would be old and dated by the time it went to press, but they said they needed it as an example of what made the book current and fresh, so I did it.
From the first draft of that chapter until the day we published, I ended up rewriting the chapter completely FOUR TIMES. That didn’t count the last-second adjustments to things like Twitter moving from 140 characters to 280 characters and the death of a random platform or two.
What makes this particular situation so depressing is that Elon Musk doesn’t give a damn about this situation, or at least he’s doing a great job of pretending he doesn’t.
That said, this is exactly how social media is supposed to operate, based on its underlying paradigm: Platforms that cater to the audience interests and needs tend to thrive, while those that decide to do it “their way” regardless of what the audience wants tend to dry up and blow away.
If ever there was an example of how NOT to keep an eye on audience centricity, X is probably it.
EXERCISE TIME: Take a look back at the graveyard of social media platforms that no longer exist and see how, when and why they tended to go belly up. In analyzing those examples, how do you see some of these newly popular sites doing in terms of thriving or dying? What other opportunities might exist in the wake of the X exodus?
(I don’t think Indiana Lieutenant Governor-elect and far-right pastor Micah Beckwith understands how the First Amendment works. I could teach him, but I’d have to charge…)
THE LEAD: Shortly after being elected as Indiana’s next lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith decided to take his newfound power out for a test drive by threatening the Indiana Daily Student newspaper with censorship:
WHO IS THIS GUY? Beckwith is a 42-year-old, hard-right Republican, who has never held any political office prior to winning the lieutenant governor position. He came in third in 2020 while running for a U.S. house seat in Indiana. He graduated from Huntington University, a private college affiliated with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
A QUICK BREAKDOWN: Here’s a quick look of how this situation is dumber than a bucketful of hair:
First, the students did not call Donald Trump these things. They literally QUOTED people who WORKED WITH TRUMP on the cover of the paper to make a point. If he looked at the people who said this stuff, I have a hard time believing Beckwith could get away with calling ANY of them “woke.”
Even more, people who are more politically aligned with Beckwith are pointing out on X how he completely misread this situation:
Screenshot
(Let’s also sidestep the whole “this is what your taxes are paying for” thing, as a) they are not, b) even if they were, financing a free press isn’t a bad thing and c) there are far dumber things tax money goes toward…)
Finally, the First Amendment guarantees the right to a free press, unfettered by the whims of governmental figures. Punishment for free speech of this kind is not allowed in this country (whether we’re truly a “democracy” or not). It’s unclear how Beckwith will “stop it for them” but I doubt it would be legal.
COMMENTS ON THE SITUATION: I reached out to co-EICs Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich for a comment on the controversy and they were nice enough to respond:
“While we welcome criticism of our newspaper and its content, we are staunch defenders of the First Amendment and the freedom it grants to the press — including student journalism. Our front page clearly attributes the quotes to former allies of Donald Trump, which we collected from several articles across the New York Times and CNN. Beckwith’s statement implying he will attempt to control or suppress what we publish is deeply concerning, not just for staffers at the Indiana Daily Student but for our constitutional principles overall.”
I messaged Beckwith’s office with several questions and a request for comment. I received nothing to this point, but if I do I’ll post it here. (Don’t hold your breath on this one…)
When asked if IU had any comment on Beckwith’s claims about IU and his potential action toward the IDS, IU spokesperson Mark Bode said “The Indiana Daily Student is editorially independent from Indiana University.”
In case you are unfamiliar, that’s what it sounds like when someone jumps ship…
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: This is the kind of ham-handed, saber-rattling stupidity that comes from people who claim to love this country but consistently fail to understand what our country actually protects and allows. The same freedom of speech that allowed Donald Trump to call Kamala Harris “a shitty vice president” and allowed Beckwith to refer to his opponents as having the “Jezebel spirit” also protects speech that Beckwith DOESN’T like.
I could also go back to that famous line about never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, and add that you shouldn’t take on a media outlet that has 10 times the number of followers you do on X.
I often get responses to posts like this calling me “an academic liberal” or a “lefty professor,” both of which are not only untrue, but so far afield they’re likely to make my mother laugh so hard she could pass an entire Subway footlong through her nose.
In truth, I’m neither left or right, but I am definitely anti-bully and anti-hypocrite. I see this guy as being in both zones, so that’s why he really needs a reality check.
ACTION OFFER: If you want to tell Beckwith what you think about this, you can hit him up on Twitter/X, or email him through his campaign website here. Maybe if he hears enough from enough people, he’ll learn something.
That said, the guy literally thinks that Jesus pushed him to take the Beckwith Model of Intolerance and Stupidity ™ to the political sphere, so I somehow doubt he’s going to back off.
People in the journalism educational community have been asking a variety of questions related to their students and the outcome of the 2024 election. Although they vary in tone, concern and topic, they basically boil down to these types of questions:
What should I be telling my students about the outcome of the election?
What should journalism for them look like now that Trump is president again?
What should they do, as journalists, in this current environment?
I’m often accused of being reductive in cases like this, but I believe that we overthink the heck out of stuff like this.
For example, my answer to the first one would be pretty basic:
Trump won the election, both the electoral college and the popular vote. If you like that, fine. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, too. However, facts are facts and people need to learn how to accept them.
You live in a country where people get to choose a leader, and sometimes people make choices you don’t like or can’t understand. That’s the risk of living in a society like ours, but it is how things work.
If you don’t like what happened this time, you can easily use the skills you garnered in any journalism class to be part of a political campaign and try to move the needle in the direction you prefer. If you like what happened this time, you can use those same skills to maintain this new status quo. However, you can’t do these things and be a news journalist at the same time.
I can already think of at least six people who are furiously writing a five-page email to me, condemning that simplicity. So, if you hated that, you’re really going to hate the rest of this.
Journalism is a lot of things, but at its most basic, it’s about finding out what’s going on, making sense of that and then telling it to people who need to know this stuff in a way that makes sense to them. It requires you to keep the door of objectivity open, at least a crack, when you talk to people and to do your best to understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what it means to your audience.
So, with that as the backdrop, here are three basic things I would tell students about doing the job in this current state of being:
Stick to the facts in your reporting: When I said this to a few Harris supporters, I got the expected response: “This is stupid! Trump and his followers never accepted facts!”
First of all, Trump secured nearly 76 million votes, so to assume that every one of his followers won’t accept a fact is problematic and stereotypical. I can’t get four faculty members with the same level of education, same Midwestern roots, same area of study and same views on child rearing to all think the same way about where we should go to lunch half the time, so to assume 76 million people are exactly alike in a pretty problematic way is relatively stupid.
Second, the goal of journalism isn’t a race to the bottom or fighting stupid with stupid. You do things the way you’re brought up to do them, like finding facts, interviewing key sources, telling stories and so forth in this field. Even if you do all that, there will be people who don’t believe you, whether it’s about the Jan. 6 riot or that you know someone who has six toes.
As I used to tell Zoe when some kid was trying to set fire to the McDonald’s Playland or throwing a tantrum in the middle of Walmart, “I’m not that kid’s parent. I’m your parent. This is not how you behave.”
If you signed up to do a job, you do the job the way it needs to be done. As far as journalism is concerned, that’s relying on facts and presenting perspectives. You aren’t a superhero, set out to right wrongs or showcase what you “feel people should think.” Doing that has led to some of the biggest disasters in our field.
Understand your audience and work for those people: If you are working for a traditional media outlet, you will likely have a mix of people who voted in the past election. Those people might consider politics the only thing that matters, or they might be low-involvement voters who have a little more than a passing interest on elections. Some of each may have voted for Trump and Harris for one of a dozen reasons.
To assume that the audience thinks exactly as you do is to doom yourself to failure, so instead of doing that, go actually interact with people in your readership area and figure out what matters most to them.
This can be things that have very little to do with the major elections, or they might be tied directly to them. Where people live, what types of jobs they hold and what challenges they face can be crucial to keeping your eye on the ball when picking stories to write.
For example, the issue of tariffs came up multiple times in the election. The talking heads on various national news programs have come up with a variety of reasons why these are good or bad or whatever. Instead of looking at a large national story, look at things that your local community needs and how specific changes to financial policies have impacted them.
If you are covering a rural community, see how things like the costs of fertilizer, feed, veterinary medication and so forth have changed before, during and after tariffs are imposed. If countries are reciprocating by taxing incoming products, see how the things the farms produce that traditionally get exported are impacted. If all politics is truly local, so is the impact of political decisions.
Beyond that, look at the things that people are actually saying impact their lives and see what can be done about that. Not everything is Watergate, but everything we do can reach people in an important and effective fashion.
I often go back to the story a student wrote for me decades ago at the Columbia Missourian. She found out from a wheelchair user that this person had to ride in the road and risk getting hit by cars because the sidewalks were so lousy. The student wrote the story and caught hell from the city manager, who demanded she retract the story. She kind of freaked out and asked what we should do.
“You hit a nerve,” I told her. “Keep going.”
Later that day, a large group of wheelchair users were gathering for a “Wheelie Rally” in the park to discuss this issue. The student reported on that, further ticking off the city manager. Still, she kept going on this story, covering the events and making people aware of the issue.
About six months later, the city manager stood up at a city council meeting and said he wanted to reopen the budget to deal with the condition of the city’s sidewalks. It was just something he’d been thinking about, he explained, so now seemed like a good time. He never once mentioned the student or her reporting, but every time I saw a chunk of sidewalk being repaired anywhere I went in life, I thought of this kid.
Get reacquainted with the attribution verb “said”: This one is going to be crucial going forward, because we have long seen what happens when the wind changes politically and people have made statements. I think half of the late-night comedy shows after the election were of Republicans denouncing Trump in 2021, juxtaposed with their unwavering support for him now.
I don’t know what Donald Trump (or any other politician for that matter) believes, knows, thinks, assumes, understands or feels. What I do know is that he opens his mouth from time to time and words fall out of it. The word for that is “said” (or says if you’re in broadcast).
Do I know that any of those things will happen? No. Do I know exactly what it means for the future? No. What I do know is that he said them, so I’m going to tell people that and then follow the breadcrumbs along the trail to see where “said” becomes “does” and go from there.
Even if you aren’t directly covering Trump, it bears repeating that people often say one thing and do something different. Report what they say and also what they do and go from there.
Come for the participation in the democratic electoral process, stay for the sweet sticker.
The last time I tried writing about voting, it led to the first and (so far) last time I ever deleted a post on this blog.
I called it “Vote or whatever” and the point I was trying to make was that so many people are telling you what to do, you should feel free to ignore everyone and do what you wanted. It came across as kind of dismissive of the privilege of voting and I heard about it from a number of readers, including my mom.
“Your grandfather fought in a war overseas to protect this country and your rights,” she wrote, before explaining how stupid I sounded in my attempt to be anything but. She was right and rather than try to save the patient, I pulled the plug.
With that in mind, here’s my second attempt at a voting post with hopefully better results and maybe a better job of reaching my target audience.
I can’t speak intelligently on what it looks like in other states, but living in one of the swingiest swing states means we are getting buried in communication from presidential and senate candidates. Between TV, online, social media, mailers and text messages, I hear more from the Trump, Harris, Baldwin and Hovde campaigns in a day than I do from any four people I know.
It’s gotten so bad, I’m practically elated when I get an ad for hair loss, erectile dysfunction or “The Real WHATEVER of WHEREVER” television show.
Given all of that, I’m stunned that there exists such a thing as an “undecided presidential voter” left anywhere in the country, with the possible exception of anyone who was just awakened from a four-year coma on Sunday afternoon.
That said, when I went to vote in the primary, I found myself flummoxed on at least one-third of the ballot. I had no idea which person would make for a good state rep, a solid judge, a reputable school board member or good county board member. I also found myself trying to navigate through at least two double-negative statements in each of the advisory ballot initiatives I was asked to assess.
I know that this year, the school is asking for a bond referendum, and although I normally approve every dime a school district wants, I can’t tell you exactly where that money is going.
A crucial reason for this lack of knowledge is a lack of strong, local media outlets that provide critical coverage of these races. As much as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and other national media outlets cover every minute of the national races, the local media in so many places either are understaffed or have shuttered their operations.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina have dug into a phenomenon they dubbed “news deserts.” This is defined as “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”
The researchers have determined that more than 250 counties in the country are without a single local newspaper while half of the counties in the country are served by a single local newspaper, which is usually a weekly. Given what I’ve seen of these kinds of publications, they are almost always understaffed and rarely interested or capable of doing the kinds of critical political coverage that will inform their readers.
With all of that in mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to make an intelligent decision on those down-ballot, local-issue choices we face. So here is the exercise I would suggest for any media students who might be lukewarm on voting.
First, go vote. Even if you are in a solidly red or solidly blue state, where you might feel your vote doesn’t matter, it’s a worthy exercise. I always joke that at least I’m undoing the vote of the dumbest person I know, but it means more than that to be sure.
While you are in that booth, look at the number of races on which you feel uninformed or under-informed. What level does that start at for you? Is it the national races, the statewide races or the local races? What about any ballot initiatives? How much do you know about them and can you translate them? (Or, if you see fit, you can try to learn all this before you vote so you can make better choices, but that isn’t always easy and can sometimes feel like a bridge too far in the digital information age.)
Once you cast your ballot and get your “I VOTED” sticker, go see what your local media outlets have run over the past few weeks or months. Also, look through the media outlets you traditionally use, which could be anything from YouTube to TikTok. Was there anything out there that could have helped you learn more? Or do you maybe need a different media diet?
Finally, consider what it is you could bring to the table as a media practitioner going forward for a community that probably feels even more lost and confused than you are. In so many ways, you can have a significant impact on what people know about things that can strongly impact their local communities.
You might still feel like your vote doesn’t matter, but I hope you will realize that a career in any form of local, fact-based media surely can.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
Dynamics of Writing has obtained this exclusive footage of the IU Media School announcing and attempting to implement its plan to converge student media without consulting the student media outlets.
One of the questions I had for Dean David Tolchinsky involved the mechanism by which the Media School could impose this plan. The radio station and the TV station both have club status at the university, meaning they get housed under a department or college. They can also beholden to whoever holds their FCC license and their status makes them unable to earn revenue in the way a student newspaper can.
In short, someone else holds the leash on these media outlets and the staff knows it.
“They just expect us to change, but none of them are brave enough to be like, ‘You need to have the IDS on your NewsHour,’ or ‘You guys need to do music on the TV station,’ or ‘You need to do this,'” Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX radio, said. “And while they do have a point (that) it is quite wasteful and confusing when everyone has their own equipment and everyone has to move money differently for that, that’s not a problem that we have any control over.”
But does the Media School have control over the fate of the IDS?
“We’ve kind of been wondering that as well,” IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said in a recent interview. “We aren’t even sure what authority they have to make that decision. Our organization, it has a charter that was developed by the Board of Trustees, and so I could understand the Board of Trustees potentially having the authority to do this, but the media school, I’m not completely sure how that happens… We are asking those questions as well, and haven’t gotten an answer so far.”
Several media reports have referred to the IDS Charter as the controlling document. The charter refers to the board of trustees approving the agreement and the dean of the school appointing the director of student media in consultation with the faculty. Aside from that, it’s difficult to see who is in charge of what outside of the IDS ecosystem.
The IDS doesn’t receive funds from the university. In fact, it is required to pay some sort of financial tithing that a previous president created, so it’s basically paying rent. It pays its full-time professional staff both salary and benefits. (Tolchinsky mentioned something about the Media School chipping in on bennies in one of his letters, but the students assured me that the paper is on the hook for the brunt of the bill.) The IDS also covers student wages, equipment purchases and travel costs.
I could imagine the Media School could claim some sort of investment in the place, having helped clear the $1 million debt the IDS had on the books. As part of an hour-long panel discussion on Indiana Public Media’s Noon Hour, Associate Dean Galen Clavio mentioned that the Media School had taken financial responsibility for the paper’s accounts, although how that all worked was not clearly discussed. That said, that’s not the same as owning a controlling interest in the actions of an organization.
The only real “authority” that is clear from the documents provided here appears to be at the board of trustees level. This is why I asked Tolchinsky for some sort of document or agreement that provided the school with the right to do this. I’d try to make an open records request for whatever they’ve got on this, but given IU’s track record on transparency, I’ll probably be dead and buried before I get something back.
So that leads to the next question: What if the IDS just said “no” to all this?
“We are kind of wondering the same thing,” Meador said. “We’re thinking, you know, what, if we just said no. I don’t know if it’ll come down to this, but we’re even thinking, ‘Is there a way that we can, as students, independently fund-raise or pay with our own money?’ … I think the key thing that they have, the key bargaining chip that they have is that I believe that they have the power to discipline our professional staff members. And our professional staff members are the ones who sell the ads and, you know, handle the print contracts and all those things. So that’s kind of our one concern there.”
SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW?
When I decided to put a week’s worth of blog posts into this, I wasn’t entirely sure what the best answers were, but as I talked to the students and got the runaround from the administration, a lot of things came into focus.
Here are the things I clearly know:
Student media outlets at IU are starving: The radio station, and presumably the TV station, don’t get enough money to fully thrive in the ways they once did. Emery told me his staff doesn’t get paid and that an adviser is getting a tiny stipend to keep everything afloat. When the place went from getting 70 cents per student to zero, it was just a matter of time before the clock ran out on them. During that Noon Hour panel discussion, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman said the TV station just recently gained space in the media school, operates without professional staff help and generally has to subsist on crumbs. Why this happened is beyond me, but that’s the situation and the center can’t continue to hold.
The IDS still generates money, but it’s unable to continue to spend what it currently spends without some level of assistance from the university. That assistance could come in the form of a student fee, removing some of the red tape that prevents them from tapping other streams of revenue or even allowing work-study money into the newsroom in some way. The April report on the IDS was clear: You can’t keep expecting them to do more with less and it’s not fair to force this place to run at a profit in this current environment.
Print, at this level, still matters: The one-day-per-week model for the IDS makes money, according to the information I was provided. It also connects the IDS to the larger community it serves, provides the community with a signpost to let folks know they’re still working and helps draw eyes to their content. Even more, it teaches students how to design traditional print products and keeps those skills sharp. For all the excitement the Media School seems to be putting forward about retaining special issues in print, it’ll be a pretty ugly set of special issues if the students’ design skills atrophy.
One of the arguments Clavio made about cutting print (aside from cost, which we’ll get to later) was that newspapers keep dying at a pretty steady clip. He cites a Northwestern University study that says these are going away at the rate of about 2.5 per day. True, but that means there are still approximately 6,000 papers out there that need people who can design to spec, write headlines in holes and generally publish something relatively well composed. That doesn’t account for the hundreds of other jobs in which students could bring to bear design skills for printed or print-related items.
Beyond that, it matters to the students right now. They have a connection to this print edition that might not make sense to other people, but it is a motivating and galvanizing factor for this staff. Any alleged financial savings this generates will be dwarfed by the loss in morale this ham-handed approach to killing it has created.
These organizations are extremely incongruent: To say these organizations have little in common is a massive understatement. The IDS is really the news driver here, while the entertainment comes from the radio station in the form of events and on-air music/shows. The TV folks declined to respond to requests for interviews, so it’s unclear to me what they do and the information I got from the folks I did interview was as clear as mud in this regard.
When the positives of the plan were discussed by students, it was primarily Hackman who noted the benefits that would come to his media outlet through this approach. That’s not the same as embracing the new cross-platform, digital-primacy model the Media School is touting.
In a lot of cases, it makes sense to put certain operations together. Most of the convergence efforts I saw were of news-oriented operations, in which all of the participants valued the idea of putting out news content across multiple platforms. This was also helped by the ability for each organization to bring something particularly important to the table that the others were unable to bring. When all of the organizations saw the benefits each other brought to the table, in that shared senses of congruity, things worked out. When they didn’t, it got bad quite quickly.
As I said in an earlier post, this isn’t like putting a bunch of soup cans from three shelves onto one shelf. This is more difficult than that.
This could not have been done in a worse way: People are far more likely to agree to things, and be motivated to participate in them, when given an opportunity to participate and they are treated with respect. In the Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is a primary cog in making people feel like they’re engaged, valued and part of a process.
In one study we did involving SDT, we had people doing a Boggle grid and they were in one of several conditions. In one situation, they were given the ability to pick either a blue, a pink or a yellow grid without seeing what was on the grid. In another, they were told which grid they had to take, also without seeing what was on the grid.
The people in the group that got a choice felt better about the experience, tended to do better in finding words and felt like they would enjoy persisting in the activity, even after they were no longer required to do so.
The kicker? All of the grids were exactly the same. What mattered was the perception of choice and autonomy.
In the radio show, IDS Co-Editor-in-Chief Jacob Spudich made the case that he and his co-EIC were never consulted about the changes, let alone the cut to print, as part of the process. Clavio rather derisively noted that previous IDS students had been part of the plan back in April and that to expect the university to just keep rebooting its plans every time the IDS had leadership turnover was not feasible.
To his point, the original report from April included the names of the co-EICs from the newspaper and, no, you can’t start from scratch each time someone new comes in. However, Spudich’s larger point was that a lot happened between that April report and the one issued in October, none of which involved IDS student input (or input from any other students, it would seem).
Clavio noted that much of the work was done over the summer, when students weren’t present. Back in my student media days, we called this the “Dump the Garbage Time,” as it was a lot easier to do things that might upset students when they aren’t around to make a fuss. I’ve seen people hired and fired, attempts to cut athletic teams and generally unpopular “restructuring” occur during the summer. It’s like going on vacation for a week and finding out your roommate sold all your furniture and redecorated.
Even more, they had TWO MONTHS after school started to call in the students and say, “Here’s what we’re thinking, this is why we’re thinking it and we want to know what you think.” That, of course, is if they actually WANTED input. As co-EIC Marissa Meador noted in an earlier post, the IDS was supposed to find out about all these changes an hour before they went public.
That’s not a good-faith effort and unless Clavio is a total idiot, he knows that to be true.
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE IU MEDIA SCHOOL
I know it’s easy to sit back in Snarkville and lob shots at people who are actually attempting to do something. It’s a lot harder to actually find ways to fix things.
I lack a time machine, so I can’t technically undo this. I also am still stuck on the whole “Can the Media School mandate what the IDS does or not?” aspect of this. Even more, I have no actual authority here whatsoever, which might actually be the exact same level of authority the Media School has, but I’m not going to pretend I have any.
That said, here are a few things I would recommend going forward:
Money comes first: Before you think about engaging in anything you have planned here, get a handle on the money. Whatever requests the Media School needs to make to the university to get funding should be done now. Whatever requests it needs to do to loosen some of the red tape on outside earning potential should be done now. Whatever decisions need to be made to make sure the budgeting works should be made now. Technically, it should have been done well before the plan was released, but, again, I have no time machine.
In short, if the money isn’t in the proper places it needs to be, moving forward makes no sense.
Too often, and believe me I’ve seen this a lot, academics make these broad-based plans or grandiose project outlines with the idea that money somehow will arrive as needed at some time in the future. Promises are vaguely made about “being supportive,” but the admin never locks down specifics, and thus everything ends up falling to pieces rather quickly.
To quote a Jean Shepherd book title: In God we trust, all others must pay cash.
Get hard numbers with in-writing commitments from people authorized to say “yes” or slam the brakes on this whole thing.
Make a hard budget decision at the IDS: This is likely to be as popular as bacon on Good Friday, but I’d recommend a serious look at where most of the money for the IDS goes. I was told that about $300K goes to the professional staff, and that can’t be wiggled. I also know print costs and web costs are pretty well fixed, but likely they represent a small fraction of the budget.
I would imagine a large swath of cash goes to student employees, which is where the cut would need to happen. In listening to Tyler Emery, I heard that IDS students get a certain amount of money per story or per piece they create. I’d cut that, as it’s likely something that would go a goodly way to biting into the budget deficit. I’d also strongly consider where the other editorial salaries are and see if there are ways to cut them down, either by eliminating additional positions (assistant, assistant editors) or by whacking down on the payroll per position.
I hate the idea of students doing work for free and I surely hate the idea of cutting student wages in general. That said, if the IDS wants to make the statement that all sorts of other student newspapers get X, Y or Z from the university, they also have to understand that most of them don’t pay staffers at the lowest levels. In addition, most editorial salaries are more of a gesture of goodwill than they are actual salaries. Based on what I’ve seen at other places, and given what the radio station kids are doing, it is possible to get quality help without having to cough up an inordinate amount of cash for it.
If you can make the budget work that way, it could be a chance to keep the ball in your court moving forward while you figure out other revenue streams to augment your finances.
Leave print alone: I get why the Media School wants to kill the print edition as part of this: It gives them some sort of “convergence cred” by shedding the “old media” as part of what’s going on with this merger. It also has that surface-level look of saving money, as printing a dead-tree edition of a publication always costs more than just sticking stuff online.
One problem is that they’re not really killing print, but rather attempting to cream-skim some special issues while dumping the weekly issue for that “cred” they want. A second problem is that this isn’t really saving money at all, given the way the math works outs.
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this entire argument about the print edition came on Noon Hour. When the hosts asked about the cost vs. revenue associated with the print edition, Clavio did the whole, “That’s almost impossible to quantify” thing, but assured everyone that it was a money pit. Student Media Director Jim Rodenbush didn’t have much in the way of a concrete answer either, keeping his focus elsewhere.
Spudich then said, “Here are the numbers” and laid out what it cost to print (about $60K) and what the revenue associated with print was ($90K). He also explained how he got the numbers and that he checked them with both the IDS and Media School’s finance people.
Clavio then said something to the effect of, “Those numbers are not accurate, based on the data we have.”
Did he present that data? No.
Have they presented that data elsewhere? Not that I can find.
Could he explain it now? “This requires more than a five-minute discussion here,” he said in a tone I’d characterize as part annoyance, part bluster. It kind of felt like this to me.
A lot of what he said on the air fits this same approach of applying vague generalities and deflections to the concrete questions people asked of him.
Even if none of those other concerns about print were taken into account, killing the print edition is doing more harm than good to the overall morale of the IDS.
Call it a mulligan and back off of print.
Less convergence, more JOA: Based on what I’ve been able to ascertain, these three media outlets have almost nothing in common. That might be something that could change, but not here, not now and not with this plan being crammed down everyone’s throat.
In addition, it’s clear there’s a financial imbalance in terms of revenue generation, expenditures and even student pay. These things are likely to cause friction throughout any process to bring everyone together to sing kumbaya in a converged newsroom. Add in the idea that these people have almost nothing in common in terms of background and goals, this forced editorial connection is going to short circuit at best and blow up at worst.
That said, I’d recommend the idea of creating kind of a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) that covers the business ends of these programs. I know our newspapers in Madison had one, in which everything from ads to bills got handled by the Madison Newspapers Incorporated (I’m sure the name has changed over time). Meanwhile, the Cap Times and State Journal newsrooms operated independently and were freely capable of trying to beat the crap out of each other each and every news cycle. A couple times a year, there were joint projects that were based on finance, like a graduation tab that ran in both publications. However, for the most part, the places were left to their own devices.
A JOA would get the finances in order without having to make the more uncomfortable part of convergence work as well at this point, particularly since the pieces, as they stand, don’t fit well.
I somehow doubt any of this will get through to the people in charge, but my hope is that if the staffs at these places see these options, it might give them some ammunition to fight the fight as they see best.
This clip is both an accurate assessment of the IU situation with the exact level of specificity the university seems to be offering as to how this will all work.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
In case you missed them, here are Part I and Part II.)
THE CULTURAL CONCERNS
In looking into the convergence model decades ago, it became readily apparent to me that this wasn’t a situation where technology or news values would be the sticking point. It would be the culture of the newsrooms and the social identity those newsrooms created.
The general gist of all of this comes down to the idea that you can’t just pour a bunch of people together into a media operation and assume this is going to work. In fact, the opposite is true, as we reaffirmed more than a decade after that first look. A few things have to happen if this kind of convergence is to work:
It has to be a self-directed, organic movement.The few operations on the student level that have worked out tend to be those in which the staffs themselves decide this is a good idea and want to participate. Outside influence and demand tends to dramatically undermine convergent operations.
There must be a heavy investment in new resources. One of the easiest ways to get kids to play together is to give everybody new, cool toys. That works for my 3-year-old nieces and it works for most corporate organizations. If you come to the party feeling like you have “your toys” and that people want to take them from you, things are going to get ugly. Even more, in a situation in which resources are limited, groups tend to hoard things for themselves, even when a more equitable distribution might benefit the greater whole. Although university officials insist there will be investment in additional professional help, most of this is aimed at adding master’s students with professional backgrounds to the mix. As both a former grad student and someone working through a project that involves the use of grad-student labor, I can assure you it isn’t the same thing as dedicated, trained professional staff.
The groups must have the appropriate shared goals and vision. One of the primary reasons early convergence operations hit some significant rough patches was that the newsrooms tended to have mutually exclusive goals. In the world of journalism, being first (a.k.a. getting the scoop on the competition) is a primary goal.
At the time, television had the advantage of going live first, so when newspaper people found out something of value, they tended to keep it quiet so they could publish it in print the next day. Instead of seeing the goal of getting information out to the audience in a timely fashion, regardless of platform, it became, “I want to be first.” This was a microcosm of what tended to go wrong due to a lack of shared goals and vision.
People must value and appreciate the importance each group brings to the collective. The best way I have found to describe how this works is like this: I, as a writer, don’t have to do what you, a videojournalist, does to make this operation work. I do have to understand what you do, appreciate what it brings to the table and find ways to augment what you do in a meaningful way.
This last one might be one of the biggest sticking points for this IU effort, based on how the students explained their own operations and those of their potential convergence-mates.
WIUX President Trevor Emery said that the media operations tend to remain siloed and that they don’t have any sense of what each of them could do for the other.
“Us and the newspaper, don’t talk about it. Us and the TV station don’t really talk about it,” Emery said. “These guys are kind of on their own game, creatively, for sure, like we are. I’m gonna be completely honest. We’re primarily music station and that is our main focus. And the newspaper mainly does news. Their arts column is kind of piddly, and the TV station is, I don’t know, they do like everything. I’m not super familiar with them… sometimes (The IDS will) interview an artist that we booked or something, but other than like news and sports, there’s not a whole lot of crossover that’s possible because we mainly do music and entertainment.”
IDS co-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Meador said she had brief contact with members of the radio station and the TV station after the announcement broke. Although she hasn’t had a lot of interaction with the broadcasters, she said what she does know doesn’t fit the model established at the IDS.
“From what I’ve heard, I feel like WIUX, the radio station, is kind of fundamentally different,” she said. “They put on a music festival, and a lot of their people are just interested in music. They aren’t journalism majors at all, and so the idea that they’re now supposed to be generating a profit or generating revenue and selling advertisements? From what I’ve heard from the few representatives I’ve spoken to, they aren’t super excited about that idea.”
In terms of convergence efforts, Emery said the specifics have been horribly lacking.
“They really want us to combine all the podcasts,” he said. “They want us to be on an app together. It’s very, very confusing, and they’re kind of like, “You guys are going to be steering the ship for this thing you don’t want to do, but we’re also not going to fully support anything you’re doing, either. It’s very confusing.”
The student leader of IU Student Television did not respond to interview requests for this piece, so it’s unclear how engaged or enthusiastic the staff there feels about this situation. As part of an hour-long talk show on IPM’s Noon Edition, IUSTV news director Ashton Hackman spoke in favor of the plan, in large part because of the resources the TV station would be getting.
Hackman said the station has often operated in an inequitable position, only in recent years getting studio space in the Media School and having no professional staff to help them. Although Hackman praised the plan, he rarely mentioned the editorial convergence opportunities the school has been pitching and mostly focused on the benefits the TV station would obtain in this model.
Meador said earlier that she could understand why some aspects of this plan look great for IUSTV.
“I think that they’re, at least publicly, their organization is taking a positive position,” she said. “They seem to be publicly very supportive and celebrating this decision, which, to an extent, I think makes a lot of sense. They started with no professional staff members, and now we’re going to share the professional staff members’ work and time among all three organizations… I do see how this would be a step in the right direction for them.”
Speaking of people who see this as a step in the right direction…
THE UNIVERSITY SPEAKS (SORT OF)
IU Media School Dean David Tolchinsky seemed extremely happy and excited to announce this master plan to converge the student media outlets when he put out this press release.
“Successful media organizations are not afraid to reinvent themselves, and we have big dreams for student media at IU,” said Media School Dean David Tolchinsky. “We are proud of our tradition of excellence in student media. Through innovation, we will amplify the storytelling our students already do so well by reaching audiences where they consume content and generating revenue to support the organizations, enabling them to become the best learning labs they can be.”
In spite of student disagreement, Tolchinsky doubled down in a letter to the editor of the IDS, as he gave the “rah-rah” speech to end all such speeches:
We acknowledge the loss the IDS community feels for its weekly print edition. “Journalist” is not just a job; it’s an identity.
We hear you: Why can’t IU just give student media more money? Actually, that would be a lot easier than what we’re doing. But subsidizing a business model on campus that does not reflect the ecosystem off campus won’t adequately prepare students for the career landscape they’re entering.
Remember those vanishing newsrooms? Someone has to do something about those. And our goal is to turn out creative and bold graduates equipped to solve that problem — and many more.
You can do this. WE can do this. The Media School will always support student media.
The letter says, “‘Friday Night Lights’ with Coach Taylor telling us, ‘Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.'” The photo says, “Joe Pantoliano’s character, Cypher, in ‘The Matrix.'” Y’know, the guy who sold out the whole crew.
Given all that, I figured he’s be more than happy to answer a few questions, so I offered him a phone interview, but included a half-dozen questions in case he or his associate deans were too busy to chat.
The response was underwhelming:
Thank you for your interest. I’m going to primarily refer you to the web story, FAQs, and plan on our website, and will add that our ad hoc committee that presented the recommendations this plan draws from included representatives from the IDS, WIUX, and IUSTV. Many operational details, such as the questions you raise in #6, remain to be decided under the purview of Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush.
I did reach out to Jim Rodenbush, whom I’ve known for a number of years through various student media organizations. He’s a good guy, a strong free-press advocate and really invested in the IDS newsroom. That said, I didn’t get much from him either. He politely declined to talk about this, noting that they were “working through the process” and that the details “would come into focus over time.”
It felt like this in some ways:
I don’t blame him for not talking, because a) if he really loved the thing and told me, the newsroom kids would probably consider him a heretic or b) if he really hated the thing and told me, he’d be going directly against his boss without the protections of tenure or a guaranteed job.
What I didn’t account for was c), which emerged when Rodenbush asked a question of his fellow media advisers on a group’s listserv, explaining that his dean had asked him to draft a confidentialy agreement for the two of them:
Quick background: The recent announcement by the Media School was leaked in advance to the IDS, and my Dean is largely trying to avoid this sort of thing from happening again. I wasn’t the person who leaked the announcement, but here were are regardless. All that said… Are any of you aware of similar agreements existing at any other university between a Dean and Student Media director? Are any of your part of such an agreement? If so, could I see the language? Overall, is there anything I should be concerned about?
So let’s see if I have this right: The dean is so excited about this whole convergence thing that he’s basically declined to comment to a blogger about it and then the guy he has charged with commenting on behalf of the entire process is now being asked to sign a confidentiality agreement?
I wonder what background and relevant experience gave him the idea this was smart…
THE IMDB DEAN
According to the bio on the Media School website, Tolchinsky is pretty impressive: Degrees from Yale and USC, former position at Northwestern University and a content-creation background.
He also has a wicked IMDB.com page, as the entirety of his career prior to landing the dean gig at IU has been linked to cinema. That might be great for some things, but not when it comes to understanding how student newspapers, radio stations and television stations work.
I don’t think Tolchinsky needed to be long-time journalist, a war correspondent or even a local newspaper publisher to understand that this entire approach was bass-ackwards. Any degree in a news-related field would have told him that you can’t hide stuff from journalists, and that journalism folks tend not to like being pushed around by “the man.” In addition, all research related to newsroom culture found that a) it exists and b) it persists beyond any one individual or group. In short, things don’t just change in a newsroom because you want them to.
A degree in public relations would have helped him see that you can’t just Jedi-mind-trick everyone into thinking the way you do by issuing a few blanket statements and then hiding under the bed when people come to ask real questions. You also can’t tell someone they need to be “confidential” and then have them speak on your behalf. (That’s especially true if you want them to be believable.)
In this field, you can’t just call for a script doctor or some CGI to bail you out when things aren’t to your liking.
Jacob Spudich and Marissa Meador pose next to the famed Ernie Pyle statue outside Franklin Hall after speaking to the Student Media Board during the application process to become co-EICs. Photo courtesy of Marissa Meador.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second part of a multi-part series on the decision of the IU Media School to unilaterally converge its student media outlets, the Indiana Daily Student, WIUX and Indiana University Student Television. Part of the plan calls for the elimination of the final print edition of the IDS, something upsetting to the students.
If you want to help the students keep their print paper, they have listed this link as a way to do this: https://forms.gle/cisJyhvAxuQbC4co7.
If you want to tell Dean David Tolchinsky what you think about this situation, you can email him here: mschdean@iu.edu
Trevor Emery, the president of WIUX at Indiana University, knew something was going to change for his radio station in a fairly substantial way.
He just didn’t know what it would be or how fast it would hit.
“On Monday, we all get an email in the early afternoon, and it was three, four o’clock,” he said in an interview. “It said, ‘We’re all gonna meet Wednesday and talk about some big news for student media.’ And then Tuesday I’m my home… I get out of the shower and I look at my phone, and I have four missed calls from one of the IDS editors, and I call him back, and I’m like, ‘So what’s going on?’ He was like, ‘Have you seen what the media schools posted?’ I’m like, ‘No.’ Then they bugged me for a quote.”
The editors had received a leaked copy of a plan about massive changes coming to student media. The Media School stated it would merge the student media under one umbrella operation. It would also kill the final print edition of the IDS, shift the professional staff around to cover all the media branches and create additional media options, including a newsletter and an all-encompassing digital app.
“Then Wednesday, the next day, we all go into this meeting, and the dean starts off with, ‘Oh, the IDS got this report in a leak, and we just preempted them by posting it directly,’ The whole meeting felt like they were telling us, ‘We are here to inform you of this decision anyways, whether you like it or not,'” he said. “So then that says to me I was never going to be asked about anything in the first place.”
The mood at the IDS wasn’t any better, as the staff scrambled to make sense of what they had seen and tried to inform their readers about the issue. Co-editors-in-chief Marissa Meador and Jacob Spudich had planned to attend a meeting on Wednesday, where they thought they’d be asked for some input on a plan people had been working on since April.
“I think there was kind of like an assumption from Marissa and I that this meeting was going to be more of a constructive meeting where Marissa and I’s input would be valued somewhat, and I think that became clear that that was not the case that Tuesday,” Spudich said in an interview.
Meador said they found out the school had planned to meet with faculty Wednesday at 2 p.m. to clue them in, speak to her and Spudich at 3 p.m. and then make the formal announcement at 4 p.m.
“It’s hard to believe that anything we said was going to have an impact on their final decision if they had planned to release it right after our meeting,” she said.
“I feel we should have been considered in this decision,” Spudich said. “This is about more than just the money aspect. It’s about staffing, the abundance of our newspaper stands around town, and the visibility that we have there. There’s just a lot of things that we don’t feel were taken into consideration. And really the only way they would have been is if a representative from our newsroom was there to voice those concerns early on in this process.”
Emery said the radio station also felt let down by the plan and the approach the administration took in announcing it.
“It did come out of nowhere, and it would have come out of nowhere on Tuesday, or would have come out of nowhere on Wednesday,” he said. “I don’t really have a difference on the day of the week that I’m getting screwed over. But it was very confusing.”
AT LEAST 99 PROBLEMS
When it comes to the financial aspects plan itself, the members of the IDS had several, specific concerns:
The cutting of the print edition didn’t make sense.The paper version of the IDS was revenue-positive, and it was a key way to reach the community, both for older people who still preferred that platform and as a signal on news stands that the paper was still publishing. Furthermore, the original committee’s recommendations did not include cutting print. The plan calls for the retention of special issues, but how those are done and which ones will happen remain a mystery, the students said.
Continual cutting had not solved any significant problems for the IDS to this point. As its name indicates, the IDS once published a daily print edition, but over the years, in response to dwindling revenue and loss of print readership, the staff had cut the paper and print run. The race to the bottom of printing still left them in debt.
This plan was created without transparency and then forced upon the staff.As Meador noted in an interview, the previous cuts or changes the IDS undertook to fix the finances were done by the IDS itself. This would be the first time print cuts or organizational changes were mandated by an external agency.
The resources aren’t there to make this work.Much like the convergence efforts of yesteryear, this one looked to get fewer people doing the work of more people. The comparatives the Media School was drawing to other converged student media operations involved far more professional staff and much higher buy-in from the institution, they noted.
It’s unclear who will be paying for what.The specifics about cuts are clear, but the revenue-generation portion and such are exceptionally vague. The radio and TV stations do not generate revenue, so the cost of the professional staff will have to come from somewhere else. Currently, the IDS pays their salary and benefits, but it’s unclear how that burden will be spread moving forward.
As far as WIUX was concerned, the problems were even bigger.
“The newspaper really is like the elephant in the room,” Emery said. “They’re consistently $300,000 over budget… The newspaper as a thing works, and they know that it is profitable. What isn’t profitable is paying like five or six adult-level salaries to people with health insurance and whatever else. And we don’t have any of that. We have a faculty adviser, and she does the work of like 10 people, and she gets paid a small stipend from the school just to help out.”
Emery said the three organizations rarely interact, primarily because they all have different interests, different needs and different purposes. The student newspaper produces local news content, while music and community events drive the radio station. (A representative from IU Student Television did not respond to requests to participate in this series.)
“I sit in these meetings with the media school, with the staff and the dean at times, and I point out that we are definitely much more student-life based,” he said. “We connect with the community. We were trying to get people out in public by doing events, things like that. We just finished up our whole week of events and a fundraiser to keep our station going. None of the two other clubs that we’re talking about do that.”
With both broadcast groups run as student clubs, Emery said they were not allowed to do certain things to earn money. In exchange, they both used to receive money through student life via student fees. However, around 2020, he said, the stations got cut off from that funding without much explanation.
“We were getting, at one point, like 70 cents a student, undergraduate student on the Bloomington campus,” Emery said. “So that ended up being like $30 or $40,000 a year. And we managed that to where we had a pretty big surplus. By the end of where that landed, like three or four years ago, we had like $150,000 to $200,000… Over the past four or five years, that’s dwindled down.”
With the Media School calling for a three-year phase in, Emery said he’s worried that time and funding might run out for the station.
“They also are like, you’re going to have three years to implement this, and it’s obviously not going to make money in that meantime while we figure out what systems to use and build a client base, etc., etc., and they won’t tell us how much money we’re going to be supported with during that time,” Emery said. “I’m assuming that they’ll cover the salaries of the newspaper, and they’re like staff, the pro staff. But for us, I don’t know what that means. That’s essentially the time when we run out of money in our account.”
NEXT TIME: The problems with convergence and the background of the guy trying to make it happen at IU.
