UW La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow fired after appearing in porn with his wife, which raises First Amendment concerns

Sometimes, a headline just says it all…

ED NOTE: I apologize in advance for any double entendres. It is almost impossible to write this without hearing a 12-year-old boy in my head laughing, despite my best efforts to avoid such concerns.

THE LEAD: Less than a year after being lauded as a heck of a great chancellor for his stewardship of UW La Crosse, Joe Gow was fired from his leadership role after the UW Board of Regents found out he’d been doing porn on the side:

“In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm,” UW System President Jay Rothman said. “His actions were abhorrent.”

Board President Karen Walsh said Gow showed “a reckless disregard” for his role as a UW-La Crosse leader.

“We are alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions, which were wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor,” she said.

The 63-year-old tenured communications professor had planned to transition back to a faculty role after completing this final year of his chancellorship. That is currently under review, after Rothman asked the UWL interim chancellor to review his status in that role as well.

Gow said in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interview that he was stunned by the firing, especially since it happened without him present, and noted he felt the First Amendment protected such activities:

Gow said he didn’t know how UW System became aware of the videos, which were all posted within the past two months. No one at UW System or on the UW Board of Regents had asked about his hobby, he said.

“I would say that anything that I do or my my wife and I do, we do as citizens in the United States, who have the freedom of First Amendment to the Constitution, to create and publish books and videos that explore consensual adult sexuality,” he said.

FIRST AMENDMENT CONCERNS: Gow discussed the issue of the First Amendment and his view of how it protected his actions in these films. The First Amendment does cover sexually explicit material, as we’ve noted here before.

It also covers not just speech everyone likes, but speech that people DON’T like. It’s easy to get behind a student newspaper that wants to report that the lunch server was fired for giving poor students extra food. It’s a little more difficult to support speech that leads to a question like, “Hey, wanna watch my chancellor do his wife?”

I reached out to one of my “legal eagle” friends for a general sense of how much ground Gow had to stand on in this case.

He noted that Gow is likely in a “doctrine vs. practical reality” kind of situation. From a pure First Amendment standpoint, he noted, he couldn’t imagine this not being constitutionally protected, so long as Gow wasn’t using UWL time and resources. (In his interviews to this point, Gow noted that he did this on his own time, never once mentioned UWL and basically remained unnamed in his video stuff.)

That said, he also noted that in a more practical fashion, the system would likely make the case that Gow’s video activities made it impossible for him to do his day job as chancellor (and maybe professor) effectively.

The legal eagle referenced the Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) case in which a school teacher had been fired for complaining about the board of education in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling, saying that off-duty speech of public employees is protected up to the point where it interferes with the functionality of the employees’ organization.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: Dear Lord… where to start…

First and foremost, I’m a huge fan of the First Amendment. The ability to say and do things that make other people uncomfortable is woven into the very fabric of our establishment as a country and a society. I don’t like the idea of people of any kind saying that something that is legal should lead to punitive consequences for an individual based on other people feeling “icky” about it.

I also don’t like the lack of due process afforded to Gow in this case. Like most things institutions do quickly behind closed doors in our society, Gow’s firing appears to be a railroading of a man who did his job but now makes us uncomfortable.

Second, this isn’t the first time that an institution has punished an employee for naked stuff. Brianna Copperage, a high school teacher in Missouri, was fired after word of her OnlyFans account got around to the school district. She was doing sexually explicit content on the site to augment her meager teacher pay and noted that nothing in the school’s charter prohibited her from doing so. (It also says something that she made more in a month from OnlyFans than she made the entire year teaching.)

A Colorado law enforcement officer was essentially canned after she was outed as a content provider on OnlyFans. Melissa Williams said she was forced to resign once her superiors found out about her sexually explicit content. A similar thing happened to Detroit police officer Janelle Zielinski and others I’m sure.

Look, I totally get the regents’ reaction to all of this, in that it probably freaked them out to find out one of the chancellors was online doing porn. And yes, he was DOING PORN.

(As much as I really, really, REALLY didn’t want to, the reporter in me forced myself to look at the one free, publicly available site noted in the news articles. I needed to see if a) the stuff was there, b) Gow was actually involved and c) was this actually porn or just some general weird “let’s talk about sex” stuff.

The answers are a) yes, b) yes and c) full-on, hard-core, oh-my-GOD-this-is-happening porn. There are days I really hate myself…)

That said, there’s nothing requiring anyone else to go looking for this guy’s “greatest hits” album out there. If seeing this guy and his wife doing the nasty bothers you, don’t go and watch it. This is the same reason I’ve never been to a strip club. Aside from my awkwardness around people in general and the complete discomfort I imagine that kind of a place would give me, my greatest fear would be finding out that one of my students worked there. I imagine my reaction would be something like this:

The point is , the courts have drawn lines already that limit what the First Amendment does and doesn’t cover. If this guy were doing something illegal, if he were employed by a private company or if he were bogarting state funds to do this, we’d be in a different situation. However, it looks like the regents just tried to kill a fly with a sledgehammer and I’m going to be interested to see what the repercussions are for their actions.

 

 

Gone Fishin’: “So That Happened…” Edition

If you want a 30-second synopsis of how the semester went, this is pretty much it…

We started the year with an $18 million budget hole, filled it with the career corpses of about one of every six employees here, had our raises held up by a petty tyrant who somehow got away with it and then saw the Board of Regents get strong armed into changing its mind with a tactic that seems to have come straight from an old Mafia movie to accept a terrible deal.

I also had a weird year in that more students than usual seemed to think class was an optional element of their education and now are flabbergasted that they will likely have to retake a course. (At least two people came within a hair of not graduating, thanks to this philosophy.)

On the plus side, I got to have a hell of a lot of fun visiting with more than a dozen schools on the “Filak Furlough Tour,” which led to great posts, a tour T-shirt and a post about the tour T-shirt… I also didn’t have to teach law this year, which we all should consider a blessing.

Grades are due Friday, which means its time to hunker down and pass a few people who don’t deserve it, based solely on my desire to never see them in a classroom again. (I’m clearly kidding here, although don’t think that thought doesn’t cross EVERY educator’s mind at least 824 times per semester…)

After that, it’s going to be a little time off before I have to figure out how to teach Intro to Advertising.

We’ll be back in Late January with the regular schedule and, as always, if something pops up before then, we’ll cover it here. Also, if you have any requests, feel free to shoot them my way.

Have a great holiday season.

 

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

CustomInk-Credible: A textbook way of dealing with a screw-up

Those of you who ordered a “Filak Furlough” T-shirt should be getting a surprise in the mail just before Christmas:

Another T-shirt.

Here’s a look at the back of the one you have, so let’s see if you can figure out why this is happening:

In case you missed it, as I did the first time, I’m not on a “Furlongh.” Here’s the back story on how this happened and a perfect example of how a company, PR organization or news outlet can gain a lot of credibility in the eyes of the public.

As we discussed in an earlier post, CustomInk reached out just before production to tell me I couldn’t include the names of the schools on the shirt without permission. (I’ve since heard from at least two legal experts who remain befuddled by this, but that’s for a different post…)

To make sure that these things got done before I headed out for a conference where several people were expecting them, I had to do a quick fix and get a new version sent back to them that day. I cut the school names, went with the cities, gave everything a once-over and sent it along.

A rep from CustomInk hit me back with a link to the proof, which I scoured for any hint of school stuff I missed and to make sure I didn’t misspell a city or place it in the wrong state. Everything I touched was good, so I green-lit the shirt.

Fast-forward to the day before I’m heading out for this trip and I’m ironing one of the tour shirts when I notice the error. (Yes, I iron my T-shirts. I’m socially inept and fashionologically stunted, but I will not be rumpled.) Immediately, I figure it’s all my fault, so I go back to the proof I sent, wondering how the hell this happened.

It turned out, what I sent was right.

I then looked at the proof and found that was where the error came into play, as the folks at CustomInk infused the misspelling into the mix. I sent an email to them, explaining that this was a mistake that I didn’t create, that somehow got through and it looked doubly stupid because it was a shirt from a journalist. I asked what they’d do to fix it.

My expectations ranged from bad to passable:

BAD: They would come back with something like, “Look, this is why we have you proof the thing before we put it on the shirt. It was there on the proof and you missed it, so c’est la vie. If you want a reprint, you’ll pay for the whole thing.”

COULD BE WORSE: They would come back with something like, “Yeah, it’s kind of our fault but kind of yours as well. We’re willing to do the shirts at a discounted price and you pay for shipping.”

PASSABLE: They would come back with something like, “We’re sorry this happened and we’ll redo the shirts for free, but you’ll need to cover shipping. Next time, though, we have to hold you to what you approved with the proof.”

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this:

In short, it’s on us.

I agreed and they redid the proof, sending it to me for a review. (And you damned well better believe I studied that thing like it was the Zapruder Film before I hit “send.”)

They then promised to make sure everyone had them before Christmas (as I’m sure many of you were planning to make it a Festive Filak Furlough Holiday Season…).

Aside from essentially guaranteeing my business for every other shirt I’ll ever do, the folks at CustomInk gave us a textbook example of how to deal with a foul-up in any field, regardless of if it’s a newspaper correction or a marketing mistake:

ACKNOWLEDGE IT: The people at CustomInk got back to me right away and said, “We see the issue here.” In doing so, it sets the stage for the rest of the process. If they’re like, “What’s the big deal?” or “Don’t be so petty,” we’re off to a bad start.

Admitting that a mistake happened is really tough in our field, particularly when we pride ourselves on always being accurate and helpful. I know a lot of newspaper folks used to fight tooth and nail to bend reality in a way that made potential errors not worthy of corrections. The idea there was that by fessing up, we somehow undercut our credibility with the readers. In reality, the opposite was true.

EXPLAIN IT: One of the questions I had was how the mistake happened, as I was initially sure it was my fault. Then, when it wasn’t, I had a hard time figuring out how a PDF got screwed up, as that’s not supposed to happen. In this email, CustomInk gave me the basic explanation of what it does and how the error occurred.

In some cases, the errors are your fault and explaining how you screwed that up can be helpful. An amazing reporter I worked with back at the State Journal once covered a bank robbery that a regular citizen foiled by tackling the robber outside the bank. However, she managed to invert the names, thus calling the hero by the name of the robber and the robber by the name of the hero. Clearly, that caused some problems.

Another case we discussed on the blog earlier explained how an award-winning sports journalist accidentally put a former Beatles drummer on the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s.

In both cases, the reporter explained how those mistakes had occurred, with the idea that in figuring this out and talking about it, the reporter would be less likely to have the same thing happen again.

Also, in some cases, it ISN’T your fault: A press release has the wrong information, a source misspoke or one of a dozen other things happened. In explaining those issues, you can also save face in the eyes of your audience.

FIX IT: Not every mistake can be undone, as was the case with our look at the “filthiest” paragraph error. The paper there ran a correction, an apology, a letter from the writer and more, but it still wasn’t enough to make things better for Bubba Dixon.

However, whenever a mistake can be fixed, do so to the best of your ability. It might not be fun and it might not be easy, but do everything you can to restore faith in you and your organization.

Sure, CustomInk could have told me to go pound sand, and from a legal standpoint, I’m sure that would have been OK. However, the folks there realized that a ticked-off customer is not something they want roaming the internet. Even more, I’d had so many good experiences with them, I’m sure they didn’t want the last one to be terrible.

Therefore, they realized the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze here and they decided to fix it in the best way possible, knowing they probably lost some money on the deal, but also knowing that they kept a customer happy.

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out with Colorado State

The final stop on the fall version of the Filak Furlough Tour took place at Colorado State University, where we decided to kind of go with a broader Q and A approach.

Like every pit class I’ve ever taught or attended, I had a couple in the front row, a couple in the middle of the auditorium and a back row that would probably gone further back if they could have.

It’s nice to know that some things in life are eternal…

Students line up before class to make damned sure they sign in and get credit for putting up with me…

COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY — FORT COLLINS, CO

THE TOPIC: Pretty much anything they wanted to talk about. The one key area students hit on a couple times was the issue of how to get ready for life beyond school, either through internships or through finding something that matters to you.

THE BASICS: In terms of finding an internship, it’s not what you know. It’s whom you know. My best advice is to get to know the people teaching your professionally oriented media classes, as they are the ones with connections in the field.

The reasons they have these connections can vary based on if they’re still working the field or if they’ve been retired to academia, but the one thing that is a universal is their connections. I explained to the students that in most cases, there was someone five or six years ago who was sitting in the same seat you are and was desperate to get an internship. Now, those people are the ones looking for interns, and they’re probably going to reach out to that professor and ask, “You got anyone good?”

I don’t know how many times I’ve played matchmaker over the. years, but what I do know is that I have a lot of former students who have hired a lot of interns from my classes. I also know a lot of former students who work with other former students, as birds of a feather tend to flock together. Also, the students who tended to like the way I taught them and the skills I helped them hone will likely want similarly taught and honed students.

That’s not to say that being an alumni-based nepo-baby is all it takes. You still need to be skilled in the field in which you want to work, have work product to show potential hiring folks and basically be a worthwhile human being. However, there seems to be an abundance of folks who are all relatively similar in the minds of hiring professionals  in regard to each of these areas. Therefore, to separate yourself, that’s where the connections come in because these people can vouch for you in a way that has real meaning to potential hiring folks.

 

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART I): In your experience, how much of a problem is it if a student doesn’t really have a full sense of where they want to go or what they want to do with their degree upon graduation?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART I): The truth of the matter is that nobody has it all figured out in college. The people who say they have always known they want to do X and are working on a degree to put them on a path to achieving X are most likely going to change majors four times, change colleges at least twice and end up wandering the earth like Caine in “Kung Fu” trying to find something or other.

What tends to put you on the best path is when you go into something with a desire to learn something of value. In media classes in particular, I like to talk about putting tools into your toolbox. Each skill you pick up will make you more useful down the road, wherever that road takes you.

I recommend trying out things through student media and student orgs to see what appeals to you and what looked better on paper than it did in real life. Internships also give you a peek at what you might like and what you might not.

Either way, look for things that interest you and there’s a strong probability that your media skills will somehow apply and get you where you want to go, even if you don’t know where that is yet.

 

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART II): What are the most important things you can have or skills you can develop if you want to be a success in this field?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART II): As much as I know people want to hear things like “Learn THIS social media tool” or “Pivot to THIS platform,” the best answer I have is completely different. I have found these were the things that have made a difference for me and a lot of other people I know who have been successful in this realm:

ENTHUSIASM: Of all the things ever said or written about me, my favorite is in a going-away card that’s about 25 years old. When I left the State Journal, the folks there were nice enough to give me a going-away party, a cake and a card. In that card, were a lot of “Good Luck” messages, but my editor, Teryl Franklin, wrote this: The one thing I’ll always remember about you is that whenever the scanner went off, you always asked, “Can I go?”

Teryl was a lifesaver for me, quite literally, as she came to be my editor at one of the worst points of my career. I was a mess after suffering a terrible editor and then dealing with editor roulette. The former crushed my self-confidence while the latter helped me learn how different people worked, even as I was essentially a reporting orphan. Teryl was the person who helped put me back together, trusted me and got me back on the horse. Praise from her was like manna from heaven.

We talked about that note before I left and she basically said that it was my willingness chase any story, go anywhere and do anything that let her know I was worthwhile as a journalist. As long as I kept up that level of enthusiasm and work ethic, I’d be totally fine, she said.

Decades later, I’m still dedicated to that principle. I often tell people that I was never the smartest, or the fastest or the best at anything, but I made up for that with the desire to just do whatever I could to make something work, regardless of the odds or the enemy.

LIFE-LONG LEARNING: A great bit of advice I picked up over the years was to find out how to do something at my job that no one else knew how to do, thus making myself indispensable. In some of my earlier jobs, it was figuring out how to keep the garbage bags properly tethered to the rim of the cans. In later years, it was knowing how to fix the copy machine or how to run a particular piece of software.

At the core of this was the concept of life-long learning: Always be willing and able to pick up a new set of skills, figure out something else you want to learn and be ready to take on new challenges instead of resting on your laurels.

Over the years, I’ve picked up various skills like furniture restoration, hand caning, pinball machine repair, auto repair and more. When a kid at one of the Furlough Tour stops asked me what I would like to do next, I think he assumed I’d say, “Write another textbook” or “Create Specialty Course X.” The truth surprised him: “I’d love to go back to the Tech out here and learn how to do welding.” Why? I’ve always wanted to do body work on my car and I need that skill to do it.

If you never outgrow a desire to learn, you’ll always have a place somewhere in your career field. And if you get bored, you’ll have a bunch of other skills to fall back on.

PRACTICE: As we’ve discussed on the blog before, there is an inherent difference between a talent and a skill. Talents are given from birth and allow people to excel by the mere dint of who they are. Skills are learned actions that can be developed through repetition and desire for improvement. In short, skills require practice.

A common conversation I have with students in my writing class takes place right about the time we start working on leads. I tell them they will need to write one sentence, but it will take about three class periods. They look at me like I’m daft, until they try it, we edit it, we review it, they try it again and they eventually turn something in.

The frustration is palpable, but I try to put the situation in perspective. I’ll often ask if they played a sport or an instrument. When the kid tells me, “Yeah, basketball” or “I still play the piano” I’ll ask if they were sinking threes the first time they picked up the ball or playing Beethoven right away. They, of course, laugh and tell me how long it took them to get good at that sport or instrument.

My point then becomes clear: Skills take practice to develop, and writing is no different. Why would you expect to be perfect on the first pass on this assignment?

Like most things, the more you practice journalism, the better you get at it. Then, you can challenge yourself to try bigger things or more complex maneuvers. Keep working on it and you’ll be fine. In the mean time, give yourself a break.

NEXT STOP: Winter Break

The Accidentally Awesome Ethics Assignment

Trying to make ethics real to students isn’t always easy. Fictional scenarios only go so far, as students can be unrealistically brave (“I’d tell my editor to kiss my grits and I’d quit!”) or fall into “Lebowski mode.”

In my freelance class, we talked about the various elements of ethics (honesty, integrity etc.) as well as some of the crucial aspects of what makes life a little different for freelancers (You only eat what you kill. You might have differing standards for different editors. etc.)

That said, I think I accidentally bumped into one of the more engaging assignments of the entire class. Here’s the story:

I have no attendance policy for the freelancing class, other than to say, “If you skip class, you’re losing out on whatever important thing we’re doing that day.” I figure, hell, they’re paying for the class through their tuition. If they want to treat my class like that Planet Fitness membership they haven’t cancelled over the past six years, despite never actually going to Planet Fitness, well, fine by me.

Only half of the students dragged themselves to the 8 a.m. class in the bitter cold on the day we had the ethics lecture. After we mulled the ethics of ethics and so forth, I asked them to consider the following:

“How would you feel ethically if I decided to just give you 100 percent on the third (final) story you have for this class because you showed up today?” In other words, I waive the assignment, you get the points. It’s like you showed up and you got a free cookie for doing so.

It was like pulling teeth to get them to discuss it at first. Some were happy to take it, others said, “Well, I’d feel a little guilty, but…” Eventually, they kind of settled in with the, “Gee, I don’t know but it sounds nice in theory” outcome.

So, I told them, “I’m going to leave the room. You have 15 minutes to come to a conclusion on if this should happen or not for real. If you don’t all agree, nothing happens. If you all agree on getting the freebie, it will happen. Go for it.”

As I sat in my office, I could hear the arguing, the overlapping voices and the frequent of yelling of “YEAH, BUT, WAIT…” After the 15 minutes, the appointed spokesperson of the group tossed open the door and yelled, “UNNNNGGHHH! FILAK! WE’RE READY!”

They explained that they were going to take the freebie and why they thought it was OK. Some justified it as they were always there and other people tended to skip a lot. (“One of the people not here just Snapchatted me a picture of themself in bed, so I don’t feel bad at all about this…” one student noted.)

Some said they figure life is a lot of luck of the draw, so they just got the lucky draw. Others said the benefit didn’t technically hurt anyone, as it wasn’t like the people who DIDN’T get the free pass had to do MORE than they would have otherwise.

I then said that they had really touched on all the areas except for one that seemed a little obvious. I asked a student if she had covered a vintage clothing event she was paid to do as a freelancer. When she said she did, I asked, “So, what if, after you published this piece, the person who organized the event came up to you and thanked you for such a nice story and gave you a $100 gift certificate to her vintage clothing store? Is that OK? I mean, you’re getting a benefit for something you would have done anyway, right?”

The student just stared at me. The young lady next to her said, “I think I want to change my vote.”

Then one kid asked me, “Is this real? I mean… some of us weren’t really sure that you meant it.”

“No,” I said. “This is real. You get the freebie.”

“My stomach kind of hurts,” another kid said. “This just feels weird now.”

I dismissed the class and they kept talking about it as they walked down the hall, some arguing while others trying to reassure themselves this was fine.

I hadn’t planned this at all, nor did I really think of how it would pan out, but here are a couple things this exercise ended up emphasizing:

REAL LIFE ETHICS ARE HARD: In life, there are a number of decisions I’ve made that I look back on and think, “What if I’d gone the other way?” Almost all of them are ones in which ethics are deeply ingrained.

I’ve never been a fan of debating ethics in a classroom setting because it feels like a false front to me. It’s the same reason I have trouble teaching crime reporting in a classroom: I could do a fake press conference about a fatal accident or have kids “role play” a terrible scenario, but in the end, it’s not real. While ethical debates give the students some things to consider, the impact isn’t there.

The thing that made this situation hard for them was that there were real consequences. They got something for free, which they likely felt they didn’t earn. It was an all-or-nothing situation, which I have found many students don’t like, as they prefer to hedge their bets as opposed to putting it all on 23 Red and spinning the wheel. It was something they really wanted, but they also felt guilty about their good fortune when compared to that of their missing colleagues. Which leads to point two…

GUILT IS A BITCH: One of my favorite discussions ever happened during the weekend I got married. My best man, Adam, came from a traditional Jewish family, while I and the rest of my kin were mostly in the Catholic realm. During the downtime before the wedding, Adam sidled up to me and said, “You’re on to something about Catholic guilt.”

Over the years, we’d had these great debates over whose faith had the bigger slice of the guilt pie. He argued that the stereotypical “Jewish mother” guilt was both real and unrelenting when it came from people within one’s family, while I argued that the less-direct Catholic guilt was like the smell generated from one of those plug-in oil things: It is everywhere and it just hangs there all around you.

In the end, we kind of came to the agreement that this was like arguing Hank Aaron vs. Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle vs. Joe DiMaggio: It all depends on how you slice the argument, but both are more than worthy of greatness.  Guilt, be it Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt or other similar guilt is really a pain.

The situation in class drove that home for me. These kids were literally getting stomach aches and headaches as they tried to wrap their brains around the idea of what was being offered and if they should take it. The emotion most of them came back to was one of guilt.

I’m not saying that’s good or bad, although guilt has led me to both good and mediocre decisions in life, but to have so many people from so many different backgrounds have their mental state coalesce around one emotion really says something.

THERE IS NO GOOD DECISION: One of the things I tell students a lot is that if you end up dealing with an ethical dilemma and you feel perfect at the end of your decision-making process, you really didn’t have an ethical dilemma. Dealing with these kinds of things in journalism is a lot like this scene from “Argo:”

There can be situations where you feel better or worse about the choices and the outcomes, but at the end of the day, you really don’t get to feel like everything is perfect. The key is to learn from each situation and make better bad decisions as you move forward.

 

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out with the University of Central Florida

The phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” came into play while visiting with the folks at the University of Central Florida this week. Rick Brunson was nice enough to invite me to speak to his class via Zoom and before the kids arrived, he asked me the traditional question people in the South ask people in the Midwest around this time of year:

“So, how’s the weather by you?”

It wasn’t terrible, but I’m used to the idea that anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line views anything below 50 degrees as an arctic blast. I’m also used to the idea that usually the Florida folk have bragging rights on us around this time of year, so I explained how 45 is actually pretty good this time of year and then asked him about the weather down there.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about before we started,” he said.

Rick had planned on the traditional Zoom meeting of me on the big screen, all the kids in a class and basically a one-meets-group dynamic. However, a tropical storm of some kind was settling over his area and he didn’t want the kids risking, life, limb and squishy shoes coming to school in 7 or so inches of water. Thus, we were doing a big individual Zoom thing.

If the grass is truly greener down there, at least for one day, it was under water…

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA — Orlando, Florida

Just your typical, “Hey let’s avoid dying in a flood” class meeting…

THE TOPIC: Rick was going through law and ethics, so we agreed to touch on pretty much whatever the kids wanted. We ended up with a few good questions about both, with one central lecture point: What does and doesn’t the First Amendment cover.

THE BASICS: Understanding the First Amendment is both simple and complex. It’s simple if you understand exactly who it limits, who it supports and what kind of speech tends to be involved. It’s a lot more complex because courts make rulings that drill it full of holes in many cases and people generally don’t learn enough about it before making it a centerpiece in their personal reality.

Here’s the class recap about what the First Amendment does and doesn’t do, drawn from some earlier lectures and posts:

It does:

Prohibit the government from suppressing unpopular speech or unpopular press. City, county, state or federal officials cannot stop a person from expressing an opinion or punishing that person for doing so. Those same officials cannot prevent a newspaper, magazine or other “press” from putting out content that might be unpopular.

It does NOT:

Cover everything ever said or printed. The law has deemed some forms of speech (fighting words, words that create a clear and present danger etc.) to be unprotected. The traditional example is that you can’t yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. The law has also deemed some content (child pornography, for example) to be irredeemable in any way and thus not be afforded protection under the law.

Prevent the speaker (or writer) from ramifications from free expression.The law says the government, or any of its agents, can’t prevent you from publishing a story that your university president is running a pedophile ring out of the basement of the student union. However, when that story is proven to be false, you better believe the president can sue your pants off for libel. The law protects speech, but it also protects people FROM speech in many cases, which is why we have to be careful every time we publish (or say) something.

Stop private businesses from suppressing or punishing speech.Private institutions are perfectly capable of hiring or firing people for a wide array of reasons. We talked about this with the Scott Adams “Dilbert” issue as well as when Joe Rogan kind of went off the rails in a particularly weird way. Companies hire people to speak on their behalf or represent them based on a number of factors and can fire them for other factors as well.

If you’re paid as a spokesperson for “Amazing Cheese,” and you go on an Instagram rant about cheese being a lactose-based plot of the woke Left to kill people who speak truth to power, well, you’re probably getting fired. The company is not violating any elements of the First Amendment by doing this. The same thing is true if a private school teacher speaks out on social media in a way that the private school’s administration feels would go against the ethics and standards of the school.

Privates get a clearer pass on this stuff because they are not related to the government, which is where the First Amendment stops and starts.

Force other people to listen to you or be happy about what you say.  If there were laws against ugly speech that bothered people, Fred Phelps would have never been let out of his own house. One person’s outrageous speech is another person’s truth-telling and neither of you has to be happy about it.

You have a choice when it comes to ugly speech: Listen to it, counteract it with more speech or simply shut it out by walking away/plugging your ears/deleting your racist uncle’s email/etc.

Promote “cancel culture.”  The thing about the First Amendment is that it’s essentially content neutral. You want to tell people you hate dogs, that’s fine. You want to tell people you love dogs, that’s fine. You want to tell people you want to eat dogs, that’s fine. It’s gross and you’ll likely be home alone a lot on weekends, but it’s not against the law.  With the legal exceptions outlined above (and a few others), the type of speech doesn’t really play into whether that speech should be “free” or not.

Whatever rejecting of your premises that the general public does is not cancelling you or your position. It’s just people deciding that they do not want to hear your nonsense.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: Have you ever found yourself going to do something or interview someone that you felt you shouldn’t be doing or interviewing? If so, how did you deal with it? (I’m paraphrasing here a bit.)

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: I tend to separate law and ethics by explaining them this way:

  • The law deals with what we CAN or CAN’T do.
  • Ethics deal with what we SHOULD or SHOULDN’T do.

It’s a bit simplistic, but it gets to the core of the question. I’ve been sent to places to interview people after deaths, car crashes, fires, robberies, dismemberments and other such things, which tends to put me in a position of having to make the decisions the question touched on in real time.

Legally speaking, if I’m at the scene of a car crash and one of the drivers is standing there on a public street, I CAN ask a bunch of questions regarding what happened and such. That said, if this person is clearly traumatized, I need to ask SHOULD I be asking a bunch of questions.

I have found myself sent to places I did not feel comfortable and asking people questions that I felt I shouldn’t be asking. A lot of that I got past because I was a young reporter at the time and I was told I needed to go and do the interviews or bother the people and I didn’t feel like I had a choice. In short, my boss sent me there, I thought that’s what I was supposed to do and I did it.

In some cases, it turned out OK, while in others it was really painful. Those experiences helped teach me how to better deal with the SHOULD/SHOULDN’T situations and later in my career, I think I was better off for having experienced those situations, in kind of a strange way. It was like I’ve said about a bunch of other things: I’ve learned more by doing things wrong than I ever learned by doing them right. I wish I didn’t have to do those things, and I’m better about teaching people how to decide what to do in those situations going forward.

 

UW President Jay Rothman gets mad at The Daily Cardinal for publishing exactly what he wrote (And a few unpleasant truths about how reality works)

A screen shot of the Daily Cardinal's exclusive story on how UW System President Jay Rothman discussed campus changes with chancellors at the UW campuses. THE LEAD: The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a story about how the system president, Jay Rothman, had emailed the chancellors at the UW schools with some thoughts about the future. In that email, Rothman noted his support for several changes, including moving away from liberal arts programs at certain campuses:

As the University of Wisconsin System faced a dire fiscal situation, system President Jay Rothman suggested chancellors consider “shifting away” from liberal arts programs, particularly at campuses with low-income students.

In emails obtained by The Daily Cardinal, Rothman, a former law firm chairman and CEO with no higher education background before leading the UW System, told campus chancellors UW schools should seek a long-term path “to return to financial stability.”

“Consider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students,” Rothman wrote in a list of recommendations sent Sept. 1.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a huge fan of student media, particularly the Daily Cardinal where I cut my journalistic teeth decades ago. I also spent the majority of my junior year bringing the paper back after it shut down under a six-figure debt, so, yes, I’m a fan of the place.)

THE FALLOUT: Rothman was not pleased with this reporting and took to Twitter/X to express that displeasure:

Interestingly enough this “egregiously false headline” and problematic “framing of its story” has not led anyone in the UW hierarchy to demand the Cardinal fix specific errors in the piece, according to the folks at the Cardinal:

(SIDE NOTE: The System has never been shy about asking for things to be fixed when a story is factually inaccurate. I remember a story that ran when I was at the Cardinal with the headline “Negligence Haunts Regents.” The public affairs guy called up our campus editor and politely asked for a fix, saying, “There’s really only two things wrong with the story. It’s in the headline: The word “negligence” and the word “haunts.”)

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE STORY:

First, it’s awesome journalism. I have no idea how the reporter got that piece of paper, but it speaks volumes about the importance of things like FOIA and open records acts, as well as having good sources. People have the ability to lie to you. Documents have an uncanny way of telling the truth. It’s a great story, a solid read and well sourced.

Second, the headline is not “egregiously false” based on exactly what Rothman wrote. It was “private” (email usually is, compared to him putting stuff on Twitter/X or making a public speech). It was a suggestion, not a mandate. It included the phrase “shift away.” It did say liberal arts was the thing from which shifting away should occur. The only MINOR argument might be between “low-income campuses” and those that serve low-income students, but at that point, you’re arguing about the type of bark that’s on the tree and ignoring the fact you’re in the forest.

Third, the story does contain a response from system spokesperson Mark Pitsch that put in Rothman’s two cents:

UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch said Rothman has “consistently” stated he valued liberal arts education and shared the report having acknowledged some of its lessons “would not be applicable to the Universities of Wisconsin.”

“He did not suggest that chancellors move away from liberal arts programs,” Pitsch said. “However, as evidenced by the $32 million workforce proposal, the universities are seeking to expand capacity in high-growth STEM, health care, and business disciplines to meet workforce needs.”

As the story then notes, the email says something entirely different. As much as I don’t want to argue semantics, Pitsch is wrong here. Rothman DID suggest that in the email. To what degree he meant something else or failed to make something clear could be debated. Arguing that something didn’t happen when people can see the thing with their own eyes strains credulity.

Finally, there is a huge difference between “I don’t like the story” and “The story is wrong.” I can’t tell you how many people have called me over the years, screaming up a blue streak over a story that ran in the DN or the A-T or the Missourian, demanding we fix the mistakes in it. When I asked them to explain the errors that needed correcting, 99.99% of the time it came down to them not liking that we reported they cheated on their taxes, stole money, shot someone at a Taco Bell drive thru or some other thing that actually happened.

In one case, a student demanded a retraction because she had made several disparaging comments about the LGBTQ community in relation to changes made to Homecoming court. She threatened to sue because people were all over social media and email, telling her how horrible she was based on our reporting. When we dug into it, it turned out she said the stuff IN AN EMAIL TO THE PAPER and the reporter had actually done her a favor by not including some of the more egregious stuff she’d written.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE ON THE SITUATION: This is probably going to be a really unpopular position, but if you read the entirety of Rothman’s emails, he’s right about a lot of stuff he suggested in terms of how to do certain things and what needs to be done to re-calibrate the UW schools.

If you read the whole email (skipping the now-infamous item 13), you get a clear sense of a smart business person who is telling a bunch of people that it’s time to be smart about your approach to your campus.

Here is a basic summary of his points in a simple fashion that I think most folks with common sense would agree with:

FISCAL:

  • Don’t build out insane, pie-in-the-sky programs and figure the money will come from somewhere.
  • Plan based on what money you have, not what you hope to have.
  • Collect money you’re owed.
  • Don’t plan one year at a time for a hand-to-mouth approach. Plan for the long term and hold to it.
  • If you’re going to keep stuff, make sure it’s worth it. That doesn’t mean everything has to be cost-neutral, but it does mean you can’t spend like a drunk sailor on leave and expect everything to be fine all the time.

TAKING ACTION:

  • Do the hard stuff right away because it’s not going to get better by putting it off. Also, do it in one big swoop so that you don’t have everyone looking around each time a shoe drops. Drop all the shoes at once wherever possible and then rebuild confidence for those who are left.
  • Tell people what is going on while it’s going on and be transparent. The more you hide, the worse it gets.
  • Read your policies to figure out what you can and can’t do before you try something. Also, if those policies are from the Stone Age, update them so you aren’t hamstrung by them.

That covers most of what he’s saying. It’s good advice. Does that mean the campuses are following it? No. Does that mean those who have made cuts etc. have done it the right way? Um… heck no. Is that Rothman’s fault? Not a chance.

In terms of his look at what should and shouldn’t be offered, that’s a whole other can of worms, but as I noted in another post, most of the students and families I’ve met here and while enrolling my kid at college are worried about jobs and the cost of this whole process. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have liberal arts, or a broader liberal-arts education.

What it does mean is that just like everything else, liberal arts courses should have their tires kicked from time to time, as should the structure of any program to make sure it’s giving students what they need. I think in a lot of cases, general education courses and the departments they’ve been based in got used to a huge influx of students each term by the dint of merely being part of that system. The level of scrutiny was not there in regard to value for the students (in any sense of the word) and the answer was always the silver bullet of “Kids need liberal arts, so stop asking so many questions and go away.”

I know I benefited from a lot of my general education courses, ranging from the history course I took to understand my parents’ generation to the race, gender and ethnicity course I took through women’s studies. I also know I had more than a few classes where it felt like the professor got a “no-show job” through a Soprano’s associate and didn’t give a damn because the class was required and we all had to take it. (I tried to find a link for a clip but gave up when I remembered how the dialogue in this show would make the heads of my editors at Sage explode.)

A strong examination of liberal arts is not a bad thing and reasonable people can agree or disagree about it. However, everything starts with honesty, accuracy and transparency, which is something the Cardinal article brought to bear.

A Lack of Flo: A look at what can go wrong with an over-the-top approach to profile writing

Read the following opening to a story and see if you can identify what it will be about without relying on an internet search:

One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth. Of course, Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles have the advantage of being food, which humans do need to survive. Many commodities necessitated by modern life lack this selling point. Insurance, for example, is not only inedible but intangible. It is a resource that customers hope never to need, a product that functions somewhat like a tax on fear. The average person cannot identify which qualities, if any, distinguish one company’s insurance from another’s. For these reasons and more, selling insurance is tricksy business.

Once you give up, or cheat, click this link and prepare to be amazed.

Aside from the headline that mentions the topic, it takes more than 270 words (or approximately double what you’ve read to this point) to get a mention of Flo, the insurance lady for Progressive, and her alter ego, Stephanie Courtney.

In chatting online with several journalists and journalism instructors, I found a variety of opinions on the piece and the style of the writer, Caity Weaver. Terms like “quirky” and “brilliant” came up, along with others such as  “obnoxious” and “painful.” To give the writer and the piece the benefit of the doubt, I waded through this 4,600-word tome twice. In the end, I ended up agreeing with the second set of descriptors, but also found myself considering terms others hadn’t, such as “well-reported” and “solidly sourced.”

I learned a lot about Courtney/Flo in the piece and it really did a lot of things that good profiles should do: Inform and engage; provide depth and context; rely on various sources. It also did some of the traditionally bad things we’ve discussed here before: rely on first person; get too into the weeds on certain things; write for yourself, not your audience.

However, here are a couple areas in which this profile reached new heights/depths of god-awfulness that had me reaffirming my general hatred in this “self-important-author” genre:

 

OBSERVATION GONE WEIRD: One of the crucial things we talk about in profile writing is the element of observation, with the goal of painting word pictures in minds of the readers. In this regard, details matter, although I wondered about this level of detailed analysis:

Since appearing in the first Flo spot in January 2008, Courtney has never been absent from American TV, rematerializing incessantly in the same sugar-white apron and hoar-frost-white polo shirt and cocaine-white trousers that constitute the character’s unvarying wardrobe.

I am the first to admit that I’m not a clothes horse and that I have trouble telling black from blue. That said, I’d love to know how the author manages to distinguish “sugar-white” from “hoar-frost-white” from “cocaine-white” when describing Flo’s outfit. (My best guesses include that she was paid by the compound modifier or had massively consumed one of those elements before writing this monstrosity.)

Then there was this exchange about a purse that wasn’t:

Her purse immediately caught my eye: It appeared to be an emerald green handbag version of the $388 “bubble clutch” made by Cult Gaia, the trendy label whose fanciful purses double as objets d’art. Courtney handed it to me while rattling off tips for extending the shelf life of fresh eggs. It was a plastic carrying case for eggs, it turned out — eggs she had brought me from her six backyard hens. “Did you think it was a purse?” she asked merrily.

I’m trying to figure out what this was trying to tell me. My best guesses are:

  1. The writer wanted to weave in a product placement of some kind, in hopes of getting influencer swag.
  2. The writer sucks at fashion spotting as much as I do, in that she mistook an egg container for a $400 handbag.

The author clearly has the ability to observe and describe, but tends to use it in some of the strangest circumstances and for some completely unhelpful reasons. Like every other tool in your toolbox, if you’re going to use it, do it for a good reason (read: in some way that helps your readers).

 

FORCING A THREAD: The use of a narrative thread is something that can be extremely effective when it’s done well and done with a purpose. If you are writing about a forest ranger, for example, spending a day with the forest ranger in the woods, doing whatever it is that forest rangers do, can create a vivid set of experiences that provide a great thread.

The problem with this piece is that it lacks that kind of opportunity and is still trying to force a thread into the story. In this case, as with many cases, it’s a meal (or a coffee, or a drink) that serves as a thread, even as there’s no real reason for it.

This is how we get a chunk of the story like this:

In the absent glow of the patio’s still-dormant fire pit, Courtney and I considered the dinner menu, which included a small quantity of caviar costing a sum of American dollars ominously, discreetly, vaguely, alarmingly, irresistibly and euphemistically specified as “market price.” Hours earlier, my supervisor had told me pre-emptively — and demonically — that I was not to order and expense the market-price caviar. Somehow, Courtney learned of this act of oppression, probably when I brought it up to her immediately upon being seated for dinner. To this, Courtney said, “I love caviar,” and added that my boss “can’t tell [her] what [she] can have,” because she doesn’t “answer to” him, “goddamn it.” She charged the caviar to her own personal credit card and encouraged me to eat it with her — even as I explained (weakly, for one second) that this is not allowed (lock me up!).

Short version: I nuance-begged for caviar from a source and got it.

For reasons past my understanding, she then feels the need to add another 150-word chunk to explain what she did and why she did it and why it’s not an ethical violation:

Subsequently pinning down the exact hows and whys of my consuming a profile subject’s forbidden caviar took either several lively discussions with my supervisor (my guess) or about “1.5 hours” of “company time” (his calculation). In his opinion, this act could be seen as at odds with my employer’s policy precluding reporters from accepting favors and gifts from their subjects — the worry being that I might feel obligated to repay Courtney for caviar by describing her favorably in this article. Let me be clear: If the kind of person who purchases caviar and offers to share it with a dining companion who has been tyrannically deprived of it sounds like someone you would not like, you would hate Stephanie Courtney. In any event, to bring this interaction into line with company policy, we later reimbursed her for the full price of the caviar ($85 plus tip), so now she is, technically, indebted to me.

The author returns to the meal and such at frequent intervals, rarely with insight or depth that would aid in telling the story about Courtney or what her life has been like. It’s not a strong narrative thread and, at best, reads like someone who is describing a meal in an effort to expense it.

 

MEGA-DEEP-THOUGHTS CONCLUSION: The goal of a good closing is to bring a sense of finality to a piece that offers people a chance to reflect on what they have learned. Most writers struggle with this at some point in  time, as it’s not easy to create a sense of closure without either forcing the issue or sounding trite.

A  lot of students I’ve had who don’t know what to do use the “essay” closure where they try to sum up  the entirety of the piece in. In other cases, they do a “One to Grow On” conclusion, where they try to create some sort of morality  play that gives people a learning experience like these PSAs from the 1980s.

As God as my witness, I have no idea what the hell this conclusion was trying to do:

What sane person would not make the most extreme version of this trade — tabling any and all creative aspirations, possibly forever, in exchange for free prosciutto; testing well with the general market, the Black and the Hispanic communities; delighted co-workers and employers; more than four million likes on Facebook; and, though tempered with the constant threat of being rendered obsolete by unseen corporate machinations, the peace of having “enough”? Do we deny ourselves the pleasure of happiness by conceiving of it as something necessarily total, connoting maximum satisfaction in every arena? For anyone with any agency over his or her life, existence takes the form of perpetual bartering. Perhaps we waive the freedom of endless, aimless travel for the safety of returning to a home. Perhaps willingly capping our creative potential secures access to a reliable paycheck. Forfeiting one thing for the promise of something else later is a sophisticated human idea. Our understanding of this concept enables us to sell one another insurance.

I’m not sure if our earlier “guessing game” would have been easier or harder if we used this chunk of info as a “Can you tell what the story was about?” prompt. Either way, I’m still baffled by it as a closing or even a chunk of content.

I could make about 823 random observations about the entirety of this story, but if I had to boil it down to a couple basic thoughts, I’d go with this:

  • I think Weaver did a hell of a lot of good reporting here, which speaks volumes about her as a journalist. The things I got to learn in here really did engage and inform me about the subject of the piece and I’m better for having found them.  I would have enjoyed them more if I didn’t have to play a game of “Where’s Waldo?” among all the rest of the stuff that was in here to find them.

 

  • This piece is basically Patient Zero for what happens when someone decides that their “voice” is a crucial element of a story and has somehow convinced themselves that readers are better served by their “unique flair.” A student once chastised me for editing out “the juice I’m bringing to this piece.” Save the juice for the grocery store and get the hell out of the story’s way.

 

  • I have often found that writers who go this direction of massively overwriting do so because they have convinced themselves of their own grandeur or because they lack confidence in their own abilities and thus bury the readers in verbiage as a dodge. Not sure which one is happening here, but the results are the same.

 

  • I’ve often equated this kind of writing to a “Big Mac vs. Filet Mignon” comparative. The steak is an amazing slab of meat, so all it needs is a little salt rub or something and it’s great. The meat on a Big Mac is grey disk of sadness times two, so that’s why McDonald’s slathers on pickles, lettuce, onions, special sauce and even an extra slice of bread to make it functionally decent. The more crap you have to pour onto something, the worse the underlying thing usually is.

 

  • A piece of this nature requires a lot of a reporter, but also a lot out of a reader. (This was tagged as a “21 minute read” and it took all of that and more.) When a  reader is asked to invest significant time into reading a story, the writer should do everything possible to maximize value and minimize waste. If you read the whole Flo story, ask yourself if you feel this was true of the piece.

 

  • And finally, if you think this blog post is long, realize it’s less than half the length of Weaver’s piece on Flo.

 

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging with Xavier University

Had a weird moment recently when I got a notice from the folks at CustomInk who are producing the Furlough Tour T-shirts. The email said that there was an issue with the content and they needed me to call because it was too complicated for an email exchange.

I figured they wanted me to sign a release or have Jenny or Heather sign one for the artwork, as it clearly was original. Instead, I got a funny lesson on copyright and trademark infringement.

The problem was that I had included the names of the schools that were part of the tour, which was a big no-no.

“Unless you have a release from each of them, we’re getting sued and you’re getting sued,” the rep told me. “We’ve dealt with this before.”

“You mean I can’t even MENTION their NAMES?” I asked.

“Nope. You’re going to be sued.”

So, with that in mind, I quickly redid the back of the shirt to only include the cities in which said universities are located. (Someone suggested I misspell the names like University of Alabanana or something. With my luck, there would be a university named that and I’d get sued anyway…)

At least I can mention these places on the blog…

XAVIER UNIVERSITY – Cincinnati, Ohio

I loved the “X” thing here, especially after critiquing about 10 yearbooks where all the students seemed to be able to do was a “Thumbs Up” pose.

THE TOPIC: Profile writing and reporting

THE BASICS: Profile writing requires both in-depth interviewing and some strong observations. One of the most important things is to help the readers feel like they’re right there with you as you’re spending time with this person and learning about them.

We’ve covered the issues of reporters getting in the way of profiles before, using more “I’s” than Donald Trump writing an autobiography on a cocaine bender. The first-person crutch, as I call it, is based on a writer’s inability to feel confident in their scene-setting and interviewing abilities. Therefore, they try to turn what should be a solo performance for the source into a “1980s buddy cop movie.”

One thing that helps a lot in profile writing is to schedule a couple interviews with the source, each with a different angle on what you want to accomplish. Repetitive interviews allow you to have multiple bites at the apple when it comes to fact gathering, but it also allows you to feel less awkward with and more connected to your source. (Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors and the guy has a TON of success painting word pictures for the readers. He spends hundreds of days with his sources, like disgraced FTX mogul Sam Bankman-Fried. We don’t get that same amount of time and grace, but a couple interviews won’t blow a deadline if you plan well.)

One of the things that came up in our discussion (or maybe it was a different one on profiles this week; my brain is turning into tapioca pudding right now…) was the idea of what happens when your approach to the story you want to tell runs head on into what you’re being told in your interviews. I noted that you might have an idea of what you want to publish, but you should be open to anything when you do your interviews and not try to make the subject something they’re not.

I remember reading something a famous sculptor said about his work and how he carved marble statutes and such. He said that the statue becomes what it is when you remove all the pieces of that giant chunk of marble that AREN’T the statue. In other words, the material guides you in what this will end up being. You just keep chipping away at the topic and it will become something.

The first interview gets you the meat and potatoes of the profile. This is where you ask the big ticket questions that help you gain a sense of who this source is and what makes them tick. It’s essentially knocking the big chunks of marble off the outside edges  to help try to define what the final piece will look like. During that interview, you should listen for things that you want to follow up on, pay attention for potential secondary sources that might come up during the interview and generally figure out what you’re looking at in terms of the basics of this person.

The second interview allows you to chip away more at the piece, asking questions based on what secondary sources told you in between the first interview and this one. (“I was talking to your buddy, Bob, and he said I should ask you about the ‘Banana Split Incident.’ What was that about?”) It also allows you to dig a bit deeper into specific areas you have found that really do matter to telling the story and that define who this person is.

The third interview is where you make those final touches that provide details and nuances as the final piece comes into shape. A lot of this can be done through observations: If colleagues said this person is really kind to everyone, it’d be great to see how they treated the lunchroom staff or the custodial crew. If a best friend explained how the source has this burning desire to win at all costs, it’d be nice to see how the source operates during a board meeting or a game of cards. The detail oriented profile can really paint some amazing word pictures for your readers.

One of the best pieces a student ever wrote for me had such great detail in it, I can still remember it decades later: A guy who was going to jail in the morning was cleaning out his apartment. The sound the rug sweeper made, the “specks of food and cat hair” it picked up, the throbbing vein in the side of his head… All of it comes back to me every time I think of that piece. And not once did he say, “I’m sitting in (SOURCE’S) apartment, watching him as he cleans the place up before going to jail.”

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What’s the secret to getting good interview material from a source when you want to go deeper on a profile?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: The key to all good interviews is being an active listener. As is the case with most interviews, I come in with a lot of prep work and some basic questions I want answered. I do this because I don’t want to be caught short or look like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Paranoia has long been my best friend.

However, as we start getting into the interview, I’m constantly looking for moments where a source reveals something to me. I say it’s like when they open a door a crack and it’s up to me to decide if I want to peek inside. So when a source says something like, “I haven’t done that since 1983 and never plan to again,” they have given me a bit of a mystery, but they’ve opened a door that I can choose to open or ignore. Usually, the inner 4-year-old in me comes out and I’m asking, “Why?” In some cases, they’ll give me a great story that reveals more about themselves. In other cases, they might push it off with a “That’s a long story…” or say, “I don’t know. I just didn’t like it.”

Either way, at least I’m digging around.

Pay attention to what the source is saying (or what they’re not saying) during the interview and you’ll have more than a few doors to open.

NEXT STOP: University of Central Florida.

 

When Charissa Thompson fakes NFL reports, all sideline reporters take a whack to their credibility

This photo says so much and not nearly enough about what is going on in her mind in regard to being a serious sports journalist.

THE LEAD: Charissa Thompson, a sports journalist (remember that word), caught hell this week after she stated on a podcast that while she worked NFL games, she would make up her sideline reports on occasion.

“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” Thompson said. “I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”

She then explained there was no harm in anything she would say to audiences.

“No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field,'” she continued. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”

After every single journalist on earth seemingly did the obligatory “WTF?!?!” social media post, Thompson tried to walk this back with a more measured statement:

“When on a podcast this week, I said I would make up reports early in my career when I worked as a sideline reporter before I transitioned to my current host role,” she said.

“Working in the media I understand how important words are and I chose wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.

“In the absence of a coach providing any information that could further my report I would use information that I learned and saw during the first half to create my report. For example if a team was 0 for 7 on 3rd down, that would clearly be an area they need to improve on in the second half. In these instances I never attributed anything said to a player or coach.

So, if you’re following along at home, Thompson glibly did the “I’m so cool I can make stuff up and nobody cares” thing until she realized that EVERYBODY cares about the accuracy of sports journalism. Then, she did the “I chose my words poorly” thing, which is usually saved for when people make a career-ending comment and are desperately trying to save their careers.

DYNAMICS OF WRITING FLASHBACK: We’ve poked at sports journalism before about ethical breaches, blurring the line between reporting/fanboying and other similar things. We’ve also covered the issue of people in journalism making up quotes or sources when they didn’t really have the goods they needed to have in order to get stories they otherwise wouldn’t have.

It’s not a rare thing, unfortunately, to talk about people in journalism breaking the basic ethical codes of the field. It also seems to be in some of the dumbest possible circumstances, in that you rarely see a story like the one Jayson Blair made up about the D.C. Sniper and more so in situation where a reporter didn’t feel like asking a salt-of-the-earth pancake-eating source what they thought of inflation.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The first and most obvious thing is that, as a journalist, you don’t make stuff up. You can’t include the word “reporter” in your title and then pretend that the tenets of accuracy and honesty don’t apply to you.

When I look at the career of a sideline reporter, I can’t imagine a more difficult job because of who tends to fill it, how the world tends to perceive them and how hard they have to hustle. The majority of these reporters are women, and sports have never been too kindly to female journalists. The book, “Who Let Them In?,” does an amazingly and painfully detailed job of explaining what path-breaking women in sports journalism went through and what women in sports journalism still go through.

The television element adds the issue of physical attractiveness to the topic at hand. You might get a heavy-set guy with the remnants of a bad teenage bout with acne on the screen, but you’re almost assuredly not going to see a woman of a similar description.

One of the first women to have a nationally prominent role on an NFL television program was Phyllis George, a former Miss America. Critics pointed out that George had limited television and sports experience, and was intended merely as eye candy for men. Unfortunately, as viewers got a heavy dose of female reporters on the sideline over the years, each of whom was “visually appealing,” the rap on these journalists became that anyone who could successfully rock a “Hooters” uniform could probably do the job.

The fact of the matter is that these journalists have to hustle harder than their counterparts in so many ways and be ready for almost anything. As some reports on this topic mentioned, when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field, the sideline reporters were the first and most direct line of communication to the public about his situation. When players are injured, when fights break out in the stands or when any other kind of bedlam takes place, these journalists are pushing for information and trying to keep the audiences informed.

When one person of a particular group (sideline reporters) breaks the code and kind of does it in a “oh, well, I’m not really a journalist anyway” kind of fashion, it hurts the remainder of the people in that group. That’s why you saw Laura Okmin, Andrea Kremer, Tracy Wolfson and dozens of other sideline reporters and female sports journalists coming out on social media to say, “We don’t make stuff up. Never. Don’t even think about it.”

Thompson’s actions and her disclosure in this fashion caused a great deal of harm to journalists who already have to work way too hard to be considered journalists at all, let alone equals of people who often have less journalism-based education and media training than they do. As we have seen in some of the other cases noted earlier, this is a firing offense and it should be.

‘Tis the Season to Avoid these Ho-Ho-Horrible Cliches in your Journalistic Writing (A throwback post)

Some things only need to be said once for people to get the message:

Y’know, the basics.

Then there are things that apparently need to be said repeatedly and they still don’t get through to people with anything short of a death threat:

We’re already getting our “Turkey Day” references in the media around here, along with some “‘Tis the season-ing” that will likely only get worse. With that in mind, we offer another reminder that you can actually write about holiday stuff without resorting to cliche…

‘Tis the season to kill these 17 holiday cliches that will land you on the naughty list and get you coal in your stocking

 

The holiday season brings a lot of things to a lot of people, including family, gifts, joy and faith. Unfortunately for journalists, it also brings a ton of horrible, well-worn phrases that sap your readers’ will to live.

I tapped into the hivemind of jaded journos who were nice enough to come up with their least favorite holiday cliches. Avoid these like you avoid the kid in class with a cough, runny nose and pink-eye:

Turkey Day: The event is called Thanksgiving, so give thanks for journalists who don’t use this cliche. In fact, it took almost 300 years for turkey to become a staple of this event, so you might as well call it “Venison Thursday,” if you’re trying to be accurate.

T-Day: Regardless of if you are “turkey perplexed” or not, you’re compounding the problem with the above cliche with simple laziness. That, and you’re really going to create some panic among distracted news viewers in the military.

‘tis the season: According to a few recent stories, ’tis the season for car break-ins, holiday entertaining,  to propose marriage, to get bugs in your kitchen and to enjoy those Equal Employment Opportunity Commission year-end reports!

The White Stuff: Unless you are in a “Weird Al” cover band or running cocaine out of Colombia, you can skip this one.

A white Christmas: The only people who ever enjoyed a white Christmas were bookies, Bing Crosby’s agent and weather forecasters who appear to be on some of “the white stuff.”

Ho-ho-ho: It’s ho-ho-horrible how many pointless uses of this phrase turn up on a simple news search on Google. None of these things are helped by the inclusion of this guttural noise.

On the naughty list: The toys “on the naughty list” in this story “all have some type of hazard that could send a child to the hospital. The majority pose a choking hazard but parents should be aware of strangulation, burns, eye injuries, and more.” Including a cliche diminishes the seriousness of this a bit. Also, don’t use this with crime stories around the holidays: The first person to find a story that says Senate candidate Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. or Kevin Spacey landed “on the naughty list,” please send it to me immediately for evisceration.

Charlie Brown tree: Spoken of as something to avoid. You mean you want to avoid having a tree that demonstrated looks aren’t everything and that tries to capture the true deeper meaning of Christmas? Yep. Can’t have that stuff.

“Christmas starts earlier every year…” : Easter, maybe. Christmas, no. It’s the same time every year. Check your calendar and stop this.

War on Christmas: Be a conscientious objector in this cliched battle, please.

“… found coal in their stockings”: Apply the logic of “on the naughty list” here and you get the right idea. The story on the Air Force getting coal for Christmas after tweeting that Santa wasn’t real could have done without the cliche. Then again, maybe we’d all be better off if the Air Force was right, given the picture included with the story.

Making a list, checking it twice: A all-knowing fat man has a list of people who are naughty and nice and will dole out rewards and punishments accordingly. Sounds cute when it’s Santa, but less so when an editorial is using this to talk about Steve Bannon. Let’s be careful out there…

Grinch: There is probably an inverse relationship between the number of people who try to use this cliche and those who actually get it right. Let’s let John Oliver explain:

Jingle all the way: Nothing warms the heart like an in-depth financial analysis of a multi-national retailer like a random reference to Jingle Bells.

Dashing through the snow: This product pitch isn’t improved by the cliche, but it might help you survive hearing the use of it over and over and over…

It’s beginning to look a lot like…: Well, it apparently looks a lot like Christmas for small businesses, at Honolulu’s city hall, through a $1.5 million investment in lights at a Canadian park, and at a mall in Virginia. It’s also looking a lot like 2006 in the NFC. Oh, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Watergate as well. Get ready with that naughty list and coal, I guess…

The true meaning of…: Nothing says, “I understand and want to engage with my readers” like lecturing them on “the true meaning” of something, whether that is Christmas or a VAD.

Wishing you all the best in this season of cliche…

Vince (The Doctor of Paper)