Out-Of-Class #2: An Overview

If there was a general weakness with the rewrites, it was a superficial approach to upgrading the work. Fixes were made regarding AP Style and punctuation and grammar, but not so much with doing more interviews with a broader range of sources or fact-testing presumptions and claims by finding data that would help support or counter a claim.

In one instance, we cited someone as saying living on campus resulted in better grades, but we offered no proof. It took me about two seconds of Googling to find such proof by Googling a simple search term: correlation between living on campus and better grades.

In another story about on-campus parking, we cited someone's bok when they declined to be interviewed. That's better than nothing, but it would have been even better to find another neutral parking expert to cite. By Googling the search term, parking research papers, I came across a number of studies about parking.

More importantly, it helped me identify more experts -- the authors of the research papers -- who then I could try to contact and interview.

The end result for those who just made the superficial changes is that I awarded a rwrite grade that was barely better than the original -- if the grade went up at all.

Here's a reminder of what I'm focused on when I'm grading you all:

Journalism is about exploration; that is, getting out and talking to a multitude of sources to really get a solid feel for what's actually out there, and not simply what you presume from the start. It means finding and interviewing many people from a variety of sides of a story, as opposed to finding a handful of people to meet an arbitrary sourcing minimum and fill in the spaces between your presumptions.

We're supposed to be seeing if those presumptions are valid based on talking to many people, and not just finding people to match our presumptions.
 
In many stories, we had just one side of an issue. Maybe we just talked to officials in charge of something. Maybe we just talked to people affected by something. Maybe we just talked to neutral experts, who have no vested interest in how things turn out, but know a lot about the subject at hand.

What we need to do is talk to all such groups. Not just one, and not even just two of three. We need to explore all the levels of complexity of a story, and reach out to all the niche groups that have an interest in what is happening, is affected by what is happening, is in charge of what is happening, and is expect in what is happening.

For example, in one story about businesses that profit from football games, we talked to a ton of businesses and got a bunch of good info on how spending goes way up on home game days. But we didn't talk to a single one of the spenders -- fans! If the story is about fan spending, shouldn't we talk not just to those who take the money, but those who give, too?
Plus, the story lacked any kind of a neutral expert, who would be able to more fully flesh out what the trends and patterns mean. And in a big-sports college town, I would think just about any business or econ professor would be able to talk on the subject expertly.

So, it should have been a story in three dimensions: one side (the money-takers), the other side (the money-spenders), and the neutral experts (money experts). But we told it in only one dimension. That's not fully exploring a subject, and that's not journalism, either.

To find such sources, we need to ask ourselves, who is interested in this? Who is affected by this? Who is in charge of this? Who is expert in this? And where might I find these people?

Then, we need to find them.

Google is your pal, sure. But it starts with your own curiosity, and your willingness to act upon it. You can't just race to the minimum three sources and think, I'm done. You're done when you've answered those aforementioned questions in italics; then interviewed all those people; and then answered all their questions.

Only then do you know what you have. Only then do you know what to write. Only then have you committed an act of journalism.

Another part of journalism is qualifying superlatives; that is, showing the audience data and facts and quotes from sources to support why something is the best or biggest or greatest or controversial or sad or outrageous.

For example, if you're writing about the Ice Cream Festival and you say it's the biggest yet, don't just say it, show it by offering attendance figures and ticket revenue and the number of vendors as compared to previous years so I can see the facts behind the conclusion.

If we're saying fans had a blast, let's quote more than a festival organizer who has a vested interest in saying his or her event was awesome; let's talk to participants -- plural -- and see what they think, and include many of their quotes so that the audience isn't just taking your word for it, or the word of someone with a bias; they're getting proof that the feeling was universal.

And if those sources contradict your original premise? Then follow the facts. Again, stories shouldn't be written based on presumptions; presumptions and conventional wisdom is our starting point for fact-testing those presumptions. In the end, we write what we write based on what we discovered.

Yet, some of us did so little interviewing it was hard to discover anything, other than a smattering of quotes that got only one side of a multiple-sided issue; or superficially plucked just one source from each category, without really seeing if others shared their views or not; or failed to contact neutral experts who could help contextualize what people were saying; or failed to have data that could show the audience without a doubt why something is so.

Worse yet, some of us seemed to take story slants not based on what sources on opposite sides and neutral experts were telling us; rather, we were expressing conventional wisdom without attribution, or making arguments for a side of an issue without attribution.

That may be fine writing, but without greater research and then writing to represent what you found, it's a great argument or opinion piece or debate argument or courtroom argument or even public relations. But it's not journalism.

We explore. We interview. We write based on what we find. And before we write, we need to do enough exploring where it's overwhelmingly clear based on our first-hand interviews what the angle should be.

All because we're great writers does not mean we'll automatically be great journalists. We need to be curious, and act on our curiosity by doing lots and lots of interviews from a broad array of sides. 

Plus, journalism is about substance, not style. Like I already said, in the rewrites many of us addressed the stylistic and grammatical issues I brought up, but barely did any additional interviewing or data-gathering, if they did any at all. While I appreciated a cleaned-up story, the failure to address areas of true substance -- more interviews, broader interviews, data to support generalizations that were being made -- resulted in no grade changes at all for some folks between the original version and the rewrite.

If you answer questions substantially, it's fair to expect a substantial grade improvement. If you answer them superficially, then the needle won't move. Worse yet, in a professional environment the hope that questions posed by your editor will simply go away is not a strategy that will ensure continued employment.

Get into the habit of taking a deep breath, buckling down and addressing the issues I pose to you, in the same way an editor would. Hoping that I (or an editor) won't re-ask the question or forget that we asked it in the first place simply won't happen. You can't simply try to write around a hole in the story. We will find it, and we will demand the hole be filled in a substantial way: via additional reporting.