UPDATE TIME: Another AP style poster, big bin of exercises and information about the second edition of “Exploring Mass Communication”

With a bunch of folk already heading back to school, it seemed like a good time to boot up the blog and get back to the weekly schedule. Then, my body said, “Hey, what would it be like if you coughed so hard, you blew a blood vessel in one of your eyes?” To that end, the blog might be spotty until further notice, but I’m working on it…

Let’s kick it off with some free goodies that might be useful this year:

EXERCISES ABOUND: A few months back, I put together a bin of random exercises that I thought might be helpful to folks. They included everything from in-class writing pieces to some AI-oriented activities.

As a lot of folks might not have been teaching a class that needed them last term, or this might be the first time you found the blog, here’s a link to the previous post on that topic and the directions on how to get the bin of goodies.

Speaking of helpful…

A NEW VERSION OF THE AP STYLE POSTER: One of the other asks from previous semesters was a giant “cheat-sheet poster” of AP style stuff that most people tended to look up quite often. Sage did a fantastic job of building something out, but it got a great improvement over the break.

Jean Norman, professor of emerging media and journalism at Weber State University, hit me up with a new version that she had tinkered with to make it more helpful for more people:

I’ve been working on my spring classes and am incorporating your AP Style poster into them. I am grateful for all the work that went into it. You may be aware that the federal government is requiring all online work to be accessible starting in April. So I ran this through the accessibility checks and fixed the issues on that front.

I am attaching the accessible version. You will notice that some of the subheads are now black instead of white. That is for contrast and readability. I thought you might want this version to share for those with online classes.

Jean’s reboot can be found here for download. Thanks again, Jean, for improving on this situation and helping me help other folks.

Speaking of improvements…

HELP ME HELP YOU IN “EXPLORING MASS COMMUNICATION” EDITION #2: I got an email over the break from my main man, Charles, over at Sage, who let me know that “Exploring Mass Communication” is a go for a second edition. I honestly can’t thank you all enough for putting faith in me and my stuff, let alone taking the time to revamp your classes to fit my odd whimsical approach to content provision.

With that in mind, I’ve got the giant post-it note set up for the second edition, which will definitely include a stand-alone chapter on artificial intelligence.

The wall was looking naked for a while there…

HOWEVER, there is still plenty of room to add, subtract, multiply and divide, so I’m looking to anyone out there who is using the book, considering the book, thinking about the concepts of books in general or who just wants to add their two cents to the mix:

  • What do you like that we should keep in the book?
  • What is missing that needs to be added to the book?
  • What did you think was a colossal waste of time in the book?
  • How can we improve the book? (Caveat: I have no say over the cost of this thing, but I have actively pushed for it to be cheaper than whatever else is out there.)

In short, help me help you so this book can be exactly what you would want it to be.

And finally, if you or someone you know is a Wisconsin high school journalist, here’s a cool thing for them:

An intern from the  Wisconsin Chapter of JEA hit me up with an ask to share this with anyone I knew who might be a good candidate. I figured you all knew more people than I did, so let’s start with the blog and move on from there.

In looking at the WisJEA board, I realized at least two of the people on it are former students, as is the intern who asked me for help promoting this. They are all amazing people, in spite of somehow being connected to me.

For more information on this great opportunity, you can click here.

 

Want to be a better journalism professor this year? Learn how to weld

It’s not “stacked dimes” as they say in welding, but I was ridiculously proud of my first weld under Gene’s guidance. I need to figure out how to get this into my next textbook, somehow… 

If the headline seems a little click-baity for you, I totally get it, but hang with me for a bit here, and I promise this will make sense.

If welding isn’t your idea of a good time (or if you’re already a master welder on top of your professorial gig), the same thing can apply to any one of a number of skills that fit the following parameters:

It must be something you actually care about doing and doing well. For me, I not only wanted to learn to weld because I thought it was an amazing skill that seemed interesting, but I needed to learn how to do it to get my classic Mustang back into shape. Half the front end started rotting out somewhere in the past 15 years I’ve owned it and I can’t really afford to have someone go through it and rebuild it at about $175 an hour. Thus, I NEED this skill and I have to do it well.

It reminds me of my first stats class in my doctoral program: I’m in an undergrad pit class with a few master’s students thrown in for good measure. It’s at 8 a.m. and members of the men’s basketball team and one-third of the football team are there, barely paying attention. I’m writing things down like I’m getting a list of instructions on how to disarm a bomb I’m sitting on top of.

The difference was in value: They didn’t care about the topic and just needed a passing grade to survive. For me, I HAD TO HAVE this skill if I was ever going to get my Ph.D.  That’s the level of “care” I’m talking about here.

 

It must have an actual, tangible outcome that can be measured in terms of quality and accuracy. I spent the past 20 years or so learning how to refinish furniture. The tangible outcome was the beat up dresser or mangled table that I restored to something more useful and less ugly. The same thing is true of a task like knitting or sewing: You can have beautifully made clothes or things that look like your cat was playing with a ball of yarn or string.

Like most skills, practice can improve the outcome, which is something that can be measured either concretely (the outcome of a statistical analysis) or with an eyeballing of the item (the table looks nice, great or amazing). You need to pick something where tasks lead to outcomes and those outcomes can easily range from poor to perfect.

 

THE BACKSTORY ON ALL THIS: When I went to start the Mustang up this summer, I realized that the battery tray under the hood had rusted to the point where the battery was actually going to fall through a hole in the car. As I started trying to disassemble that part of the car, I realized this was all constructed with spot welds in the factory.

In short, I had to drill out all the welds, pry the metal pieces apart and then weld a new piece into place.

By the time I got into it, I realized there were a lot more pieces that needed to be replaced if this car was going to survive, so I couldn’t just get someone to come over and weld one piece for me. I needed to learn how to weld myself or else this was never getting done.

The tech out here offers great programs, but they tend to teach the classes when I’m at work. Furthermore, I’m told that most of that welding is meant for thick steel, like building car frames or working on giant pipes and stuff. I needed to learn how to do thin sheet metal welding.

The internet is always helpful, but it wasn’t enough in this case, so I put out a plea to folks around me via Facebook for a welding instructor. I offered to pay whatever they wanted for an afternoon or two, explaining I knew my way around tools, but had no welding experience.

This is Gene. He totally rules.

A nice guy named Gene agreed to help out. He was probably about 10-15 years younger than I was and he had learned welding by doing it with his dad. He picked up his certifications later, adding tools to his toolbox, but he retained that simple, “Watch, understand, now do” approach from his dad’s tutelage.

So, one rainy Saturday in August, Gene came over to my garage and helped me learn the basics of welding, which are pretty inconsequential for most of you here. That said, here are the things I picked up from that experience that I honestly think might be helpful for improving (or maintaining a high standard of) teaching:

Remember what it’s like to be afraid

When I decided I was going to make the leap into welding, I picked up what I thought was a decent used welder, some safety gear and a welding station. It then sat in the garage for more than two months as I read every book and watched every “expert” on YouTube to figure out what to do.

The truth of the matter was, I was scared.

The fear definitely came from at least one video titled something like “Five ways to kill yourself by making a mistake while welding.” However, it was deeper than that, in that I wanted to be good at it, the advice on how to get good was so varied and everything about this process seemed foreign to me.

When was the last time you were honestly afraid of being terrible at something important to you? How hard was it for you to attempt doing that thing? Also, if you were in a room full of other people that you automatically assumed were better at this thing than you are, how tense and awkward are you feeling?

Even when it was just Gene and me, I had trouble pulling the trigger on the welder. He never gave me any sense he’d make fun of me or tell me how bad I was at this, but I still didn’t want to be the guy who he talks about when he meets up with his buddies later and says, “If you think YOU wasted your day, lemme tell you about…”

As much as we say we can all remember being a student in class or being at the beginning of our journey as journalists, it’s a whole different thing to actually be AT that point. Furthermore, maybe we were better at journalism than these kids perceive themselves to be, so it’s gotta be even worse at that point.

 

There is a difference between a rule and a preference

Various areas of education have specific rules to them that are unbreakable, while other areas have malleable rules, strongly suggested approaches and nuanced levels of preference. As I have aged in this field, I’ve found that the more I lean toward teaching the latter, students tend to crave the former.

As a welding student, I could understand why: Rules provide certainty. Rules lead to specific outcomes. Rules are easier than nuance.

In short, rules rule.

In watching all of the welding videos, I went looking for rules. There were rules as to how to set up my welding helmet so I could see my arc, but not go blind. There were rules as to how big of a hole I should drill in sheet metal to make the appropriate plug weld. There were rules as to the type of wire to use, the settings on the welder, the way to prepare the metal for welding and more.

The problem? All of these rules that each welder told me ran contrary to what every other welder told me. All of which left me more confused and upset when I would try to replicate their work and end up with really miserable results.

Gene was great because he helped me see that a lot of what these guys were calling “rules” were just preferences based on how they had learned or what they felt was best. Even more, breaking any of those rules wouldn’t leave me blind and on fire with giant holes blown through the sides of my car.

The only rules that really mattered, he explained, came down to looking for specific things that happened and reacting accordingly. When the wire sticks to your weld, you’re too far away. When you blow a hole in the metal, you have your settings too high. Start dark on the helmet and move up until you can see but it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

I know that a lot of folks like to lay down a lot of rules with rubrics and scales and “do-this, not-that” requirements, and that can help in some cases. However, I also know that as a student, I started feeling trapped by the rules, especially those that didn’t really work out all that well.

My goal for this year has been to stick with only the rules that are absolute, don’t-break-them-or-else-level rules. The personal preferences, I’m going to explain and moderate with the idea of making sure they hang onto the big things and stop freaking out about everything else.

 

Explain “how” and “why” a lot

Expertise provides you with a sense of internal logic that allows you to accomplish tasks easily and seamlessly without a lot of thought going into them.

In furniture restoration, it can be picking what grit of sanding disks I use to remove layers of age and crud. In the pinball world, it’s tracking circuits through a diagram to determine which ones aren’t making contact. In journalism, it’s knowing which words to use, in which circumstances, to best tell the story that needs to be told.

The problem for most of us is that we’ve attained the level of expertise in our field, so much so, that we don’t always slow down to explain ourselves to the students. What is natural for the professor needs to be learned in a high-detail way for the student.

Almost from the beginning, Gene was preemptively offering me “how” and “why” answers about the settings on the machine, the pattern he used in “stacking dimes” on a particular weld and how best to move the puddle along. That not only made me feel more confident, but it also helped me feel comfortable asking additional “how” and “why” questions on things that still confused me.

Students, generally, don’t want to ask questions because they fear looking stupid, or because they assume if no one else is asking a question, nobody else must have that question. When those questions are about how something works or why we approach a concept in a certain way, it’s crucial to make sure they get answered one way or the other.

If you’re waiting for a student to ask a question, you’re likely waiting on the corner for a bus that had its route cancelled, so it’s really helpful to proactive in getting the “hows” and “whys” covered.

 

Encouragement makes all the difference

Contrary to all the click-bait ads I’d received on social media since mentioning an interest in welding, I knew I wasn’t going to be a master welder in one day. I also knew I had tried a few things before Gene agreed to teach me and they looked like absolute garbage to me.

What Gene did, which is something I have to constantly remind myself to do in a classroom, is provide encouraging feedback.

He looked at my earliest attempts and was able to tell me what was wrong with them, in terms of the settings on the machine and the speed of my welding. However, he also pointed out the things I should keep doing, as they were promising first efforts.

“You’re balancing it right,” he told me as he referenced the gun. “You’ve also got a good angle when you’re dragging.”

When I did my welds with him, he was quick to offer encouraging pointers. It wasn’t, “This part is good, this part is bad,” but rather  “Can you see how much cleaner this one is than your last one? That’s great!” He also helped me understand why my welder wouldn’t produce the immaculate welds I was seeing online.

“You’re using flux-core wire,” he told me. “Those guys aren’t showing you that. They’re using a gas set up, which is always going to have less spatter. You aren’t spattering any more than anyone else using flux.”

As a struggling student, all I wanted to know was that I didn’t suck and that I wasn’t a lost cause. When I applied that thought process to lead writing or inverted-pyramid briefs, I realized that even just a “Hey, good verb choice there!” could make a huge difference.

The thing I realized about Gene’s encouragement was that when he was ready to leave, I not only felt like I COULD do some welding on my own, but I WANTED to persist in the activity. I had an excitement about trying things to make them better and wanting to send him pictures of what I had done. It wasn’t about impressing Gene, but rather showing him what he had brought out of me and thanking him for it.

If I can do that for one or two kids this year, I’ll call it a win.

Have a great start to the semester!

Vince (a.k.a. the guy who loves to weld now)

My first four-side pipe weld. That sucker isn’t coming apart any time soon. Gene said it looked amazing, which makes it even better. 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most sincerely,

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

Four Questions To Help Journalism Professors Rethink Finals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

So there were three inherent problems associated with this approach:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

It’s beginning to look a lot like Cliche-mas in journalistic writing (A Throwback Post)

Stop it. Just stop it. And don’t you dare call me a Grinch, either… 

It’s not that I don’t want a Christmas miracle or a white Christmas or a bit of holiday cheer. And if I had but one holiday wish, as I got a kiss under the mistletoe, it would be this:

“Journalists, please stop using cliches.”

With that in mind, here is a throwback post that looks at more than a few of them…

‘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)

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

<SNIP>

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few thoughts came to mind already:

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

Thanks for reading as always.

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

Your AP Style Cheat Sheet Poster Has Arrived

Page one of three on the AP poster. Suitable for framing. Please do so, or at least prevent the kids from drawing a fake mustache on me. Then again, it’d be better than my real mustache, so whatever…

A while back, I asked you all what you might need or what might be helpful to your newsrooms and classrooms. One of the biggest asks was an AP style poster of some kind that would allow you to have some of the most frequent errors showcased and some of your worst pet peeves discussed.

I collected a bunch of your particular asks, went through what my students tended to screw up and leaned more than a bit into the “5-Minute Style Guide” from the immortal Fred Vultee of Wayne State University to pull this together. I then sent it off and asked Sage what they could do with it.

Well, the marketing team has come through once again. They built a three-page poster that you can download and print. The poster is 18 x 21 per page, so if you’ve got a mega printer, it’s easy peasy, I’m told. If not, you can merge a couple pages and send it to FedEx as an architectural document that will print two or more pages together. (This is how I print my pinball electric schematics; it’s impossible to chase circuit problems without them…)

Here’s the link to the PDF, so feel free to download it and share it with anyone you’d like.

Also, if you are looking for a book for the upcoming year, Sage included a list of recent titles across its properties on the third page. Even if you’re not interested in one of my books on that list, feel free to hit me up with a request for whichever one you are looking at and I’ll pass you along to Staci Wittek, who is one of the best people on Earth.

Hope this helps and hope you have a good rest of the semester!

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

Gone Fishin’: Thanksgiving Edition

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Either way, it’d feel like this:

 

THE BACKGROUND: Oh, hell, where to begin?

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It went downhill from there…

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ME: Go read your AP style book.

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

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

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

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

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

As a scummy weasel whose mother didn’t raise me right, I’d like to offer my support to the loud, rude piggies and terrible reporters out there (A Throwback Post)

President Donald Trump spent part of the last several days living up to his reputation of being “combative” with the media. During an event featuring a Saudi Prince, he told a journalist from ABC how terrible she was, before musing about how the FCC should consider yanking the network’s license to broadcast.

A few days prior, he barked “Quiet! Quiet, Piggy!” at a BBC reporter while she was trying to ask him a question on Air Force One.

The journo-folks in my orbit have poked at this in a lot of ways. Some are arguing the media outlets didn’t do enough to defend these journalists. Some have pointed out that with both journalists being women, this was another case of sexism rearing its ugly head. Some have said it’s another case of “Trump being Trump” so why are we surprised.

Truth be told, if you’ve worked in this field for more than about 20 minutes, you’ve likely found yourself on the end of the ugly stick, with someone swinging it wildly at you.

Even before Trump, politicians were railing against reporters and their work. If you covered education, parents, teachers and school administrators were likely to be upset with something you covered and weren’t afraid of telling you about it. If you spent time in business, entertainment or sports, you probably had a few run-ins with people who didn’t like what you wrote.

In covering crime, I got more than a few irate calls over the years, including one person screaming at me about how we made her son look bad by reporting his role in a shooting. A sentence I’ve never said before came out of my mouth: “Ma’am, it’s not my fault your son was shooting at people in a Taco Bell drive thru.”

I guess part of the umbrage we’re feeling in regard to these current outbursts is because we’d like to expect more out dignity and decorum out of the president of the United States than we got out of an angry mother of some guy who just landed in jail for the umpteenth time, despite her insistence he’s “such a good boy.”

With that in mind, here’s a throwback to a post about the beatings we all seem to take in the media and why it is good reporters stick with it:

 

Scummy weasels and death peddlers: What some people think about journalism (and why we tolerate their ignorance.)

“Your mother didn’t raise you right.”

I forget the context of that comment, but I know a woman yelled it at me over the phone once when I had the temerity to ask her a question about something someone she knew had done that landed that guy in jail. The implication was that I had nothing better to do than make people miserable and that if my mother had raised me properly, I’d know how sleazy I was being at this very moment.

The reason I bring this up is the story that is making the rounds, thanks to Dana Loesch’s speech at the recent CPAC event. Loesch, a National Rifle Association spokesperson, told the room that the mainstream media just loved it when someone went on a massive shooting spree:

“Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it,” Dana Loesch said Thursday. “Now I’m not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back (of the room).”

As someone who spent a good amount of time in a newsroom and even more time teaching budding journalists, it’s a little hard to swallow that statement. (I’m not alone in that regard, as multiple journalists have called out Loesch for her statements at CPAC.) The point here, however, isn’t to poke at Loesch but rather to let you know that although the statement is a bit more hyperbolic than most of those made about the media, it’s not rare that people think about journalists this way.

Former college basketball coach Bobby Knight turned hating the media into an art form and a cottage industry. Here are 10 of Knight’s most “memorable” soundbites, about half of which involve him fighting with the press. (Number 8 is my favorite, in which he compares journalism to prostitution.)

Knight isn’t the only person to hate the media for being the media. The clip of CNN’s Jim Acosta battling Donald Trump:

And he wasn’t the first president to rip on the media in front of a large group of people:

However, perhaps the greatest diatribe regarding how journalists react to disasters came not from a politician, but rather from musician Don Henley. His 1982 release of “Dirty Laundry” was No. 1 on the charts that year and really picked apart the way in which TV journalists appeared to enjoy “disaster porn.”

Personally, I’ve been called words I’ve been asked to avoid using on the blog. I think “scum” was the most user-friendly word I could include here. I’ve been accused of having vendettas against people for reporting that the caller’s son got involved in a shooting some place. I’ve been told to get a real job. I’m sure if you asked any of your professors who worked in the field, any one of them could tell you similar stories in which people took out their gripes on a journalist or two.

Still, as Allison Sansone noted earlier, you are serving readers who need you to get them information, even if that information is unpleasant. Of all the things I’ve seen that were nauseating, destructive or worse, I’ve never felt particularly happy about them. Sure, the adrenaline is pumping and the anxiety goes through the roof, so I can see how people would think I was “up” a bit while on the scene of something. However, I was never happy to see a dead guy, a fire-scarred woman or a flaming house full of dead dogs (all things I had to witness.).

This field can be a rough one to enter, especially if you enjoy people liking you or your work being positively appreciated on a universal scale. (I remember somebody once remarking about this idea, “If you want to be loved, go plan kids’ birthday parties for a living.” Personally, I find that more terrifying than covering a lot of the stuff I covered.) However, if you read through the responses the reporters gave to Loesch’s statement, you’ll find that they felt the job was worth it and the experiences associated with some of these traumatic events led to a greater sense of self.

I can’t think of many careers that will get you all of that. Even if it means you have to apologize to your mother for what people think of her child-rearing skills.

The Junk Drawer: The Big, Beautiful Edition

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

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

 

SCORE ONE FOR THE GOOD GUYS

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

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

Suits against the city and other individuals are ongoing.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

STOP TRYING TO MAKE “FETCH” HAPPEN:

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

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

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

<SNIP>

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican

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

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

This clearly must stop.

PERHAPS THEY’LL RELOCATE TO NEW JERERSEY:

 

And finally… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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