Out-Of-Class #1: A Quick Overview

Here's the good news: everybody made deadline. That's a great start.

Now, here's the bad news: unfortunately, we had some fatals.


And the frustrating thing to me was that it was clear that the fatals came from the simplest of mistakes, and were ones where the most basic principles of fact-checking were not being followed. You know, the same old stuff.

All the fatals were the same in nature: a misspelled name. A school name, a person's name, a business name; just names.
 
We need to make sure we don't take anything for granted, and double-check all info we have in a story. We need to ask ourselves, how do we know that? And then we need to check against a source of that information to make sure what we have is true and accurate.

Early on in this class, I talked about how doing all the little routine things in journalism -- like thoroughly checking your work to make sure what you wrote was what you intended to write, and that it was accurate as compared to your notes and the facts -- was something that you could never take for granted. It's not.

And it has nothing to do with talent, just vigilance. In the same way American can have the best army in the world, it doesn't really matter if the one night the army takes the night off, Canada decides to invade us.

Or if we're trying to stay in shape, and instead of running our miles every day we start to cut corners and slack here and there. Eventually, the pounds will start showing.

The fact is, you could be the world's best journalist, and you still have to do all the little and annoying things -- like checking routine facts -- if you want to stay ahead of making mistakes. Because when you're processing thousands of words a day in a professional environment and on deadline, a mistake is always waiting to catch you at a lax moment and bite your ass.
 
It's why The New York Times has the best journalists in the world, yet they still have a copy desk.
 
So there's no big thing to learn from the fatals, other than if we want to do things the right way, we have to do things the right way completely and each and every time.
 
This job isn't about writing. It's about getting it right. I'm sorry some of you have to learn that lesson in a very harsh manner, because in this case we're not talking about a practice story that's worth not very much in terms of your final grade; we're dealing with an out-of-class story that's worth ten times as much.
 
The good news is, you have a rewrite. You have the opportunity to do a fourth out-of-class story, which will negate your worst-graded out-of-classer. You have other assignments. And I will offer a wide range of extra-credit opportunities that will do two things: prove to me that you can do all those little things right (along with the big things), and give you an opportunity to repair your grade and (hopefully) essentially make these fatals go away when it comes to your final grade.
 
But we have to start making sure we're following all the steps, every time. No more short cuts. No more assumptions.
 
Each and every one of you is capable of doing this, and doing it well. But we need to do all the things we're supposed to do for that to happen.

This is a particularly big problem with out-of-class stories. Out-of-class stories are kind of like midterms and finals: they are a BIG part of our final grade. The whole point of doing a bunch of practice stories has been to emphasize your good habits, identify your bad habits and fix the latter, so that by the time we do out-of-class stories you're not at risk of making a huge small mistake on something that's oging to be a huge part of your final grade.

Folks, let's please make sure we're doing our due diligence and carefully fact-checking, based on the advice and handouts and checklists from previous blog posts.

For the most part, many people did very well -- but not great. Writing, organization and story structure were in general very, very good, but where we fell short was with range of sources.

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.

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.

Now, having said that,  I'm pretty happy with how things went.

Were things perfect? No. You probably know that already, from all the comments I made. But when I was comparing your work to that of previous classes on the first out-of-classer, I think in many ways you showed more advanced work than many of those classes did.

In general, I think not only are where we ought to be, we're probably a little bit ahead of where I thought we should be, based on previous classes.

So, good job!

Plus, two more good things: first, I usually find that the first out-of-classer is the hardest one to do, since you have nothing to compare it to in terms of writing and organizing a self-reported  story, and especially regarding setting up and carrying out in-person interviews.

Now, since you have those experiences, the second and third ones should be much easier.

Second, I'd like to remind you that even though the semester is halfway done, the work we've done so far represents only about 25 percent of your final grade. That means 75 percent of your grade will be determined in the coming weeks.

So, if you've struggled at times at the start of this class, don't fret. There's still plenty of work with which you can show me that you're picking up concepts, executing them well, and deserve a great grade.