JRN 200: Neutral Experts

Today, I'm going to introduce a new concept that you'll need for completing your self-reported out-of-class stories. And that concept is that of neutral experts.

Neutral experts are people who have a great deal of knowledge and/or expertise regarding the subject you're writing about, but importantly they don't have an interest in the outcome. It's someone who can offer analysis that helps readers decide which side of an issue is more credible. In a one-sided story, it helps readers evaluate whether the people you're writing about are on the up and up.

Think of it in terms of a game: you normally have one side and the other side, right? How you view the game depends on which side you're on. Unless you have a referee, that is. A neutral expert is sort of a referee, helping point on when one side is telling the truth and the other side is stretching it a bit -- or a lot.

Let's say you're doing a story on a new business coming to East Lansing. You'd certainly talk to the business owner, but he or she has an interest in telling you positive stuff, since they own the biz. You can talk to rival businesses, but they have an interest in making themselves look better than the new guy. You can talk to shoppers who do have a valid viewpoint, but they are not expert at economic development.

That's where a neutral expert like, say, a business school prof  at MSU, can come in handy. That person doesn't have a stake in whether a business succeeds or fails, but they are expert at business, and can comment on the pros and cons not based on self-interest but rather on expertise. And that expertise helps a reader sort out all the competing perspectives, and decide which ones are credible and carry the most weight and relevance.


Most news stories at least attempt to include at least one neutral expert. And you can find a neutral expert about almost anything, no matter how obscure.

Let's look at this example: during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a lot was made about how the Obamas would fist-bump each other. The New York Times Sunday Magazine even did a story about it.

Here's how the story started:

Is this the end of high-five?  On the night in June that Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he and his wife, Michelle, exchanged what was variously described as a “closed-fist high five,” a “fist pound,” a “knuckle buckle” and a “fist jab.” Jonathan Tilove in The New Orleans Times-Picayune called the gesture “the dap heard ’round the world,” which he felt encapsulated “the new cultural trajectory of American politics.”

Believe it or not, they found an expert on fist-bumping. And that expert was right here. Let's continue the story:

Prof. Geneva Smitherman, director of African-American language study at Michigan State University, says: “Pound is when knuckles touch in a horizontal position. That’s the gesture that Michelle and Barack used. Dap is when the knuckles touch in a vertical position. Both gestures can be used as a greeting, to signal respect, agreement, bonding.” 

Dap started among black soldiers during the Vietnam War; to give “some dap” (not usually “a” dap) means “to offer kudos, congratulations”; Prof. James Peterson of Bucknell, a hip-hop historian, says he thinks it is rooted in dapper, “neat, fashionably smart.” Pound came out of hip-hop in the late 1980s. Fist bump came later: a 1996 note in the Sports Network wire service reported that Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles was accepting congratulations from baseball teammates with “high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.” Peterson says the new phrase robs the gesture of its cultural significance, which includes the Obamas’ “quiet but pronounced in-group affiliation with all of black America.”

Hand signals have a checkered history in politics, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s V-for-victory sign to the famed photo of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers to the clenched-fist salute of “black power” to Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for “pressing the flesh.” 

When Michelle Obama visited Barbara Walters on “The View” on ABC, the candidate’s wife sought to soften her image with “I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please. It is now my signature bump. . . . I got it from the young staff. That’s the new high-five.” 

Colleges are notorious for being loaded with neutral experts (think of all your profs doing research, and all the TA's working on their thesis papers!) So really, there's no excuse for you NOT to find a neutral expert, especially here or at other schools.

Like many other schools, MSU -- in hopes of getting free publicity -- even makes it easy to find experts. The MSU News Office's Web site has an experts list, which you can link to here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/Results/?

Just looking at the first page, these are just some of the topics for which MSU can find you a neutral expert: wind power, renewable energy, water preservation, breast cancer, breast cancer education, medical education, microfinance, filmmaking, documentary production, sensors and nano-bisensor devices for biodefense, health diagnostics and theraputics, child welfare, biblical references and history, Samartian population, meteorology and climatology, Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics, society and culture, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, school funding, school choice, school district building projects, the effects of mass communications, health communications, communications campaigns, international relations, the Middle East, Muslim issues, the early formation of galaxies, tax and expenditure policies, state and local public finance, poverty and income distribution, campus sustainability, Internet governance, new wireless technologies, telecommunications regulation and policy, bone and tissue engineering, labor markets, chaos theory, alternative dispute resolution, primitive stars, galaxy formation, labor unions and collective bargaining, international and domestic labor policy, work and family policy, flexible scheduling policy, tropical diseases, malaria, AIDS/HIV . . .

. . . and those are just a FEW of the subject areas!

You can also search by typing in a topic here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/

I took some general topics and looked for experts. Like Google, sometimes you have to try the same general term in different ways (like if you're searching for an expert in campus safety, you try that term, then campus, then safety, then police, and so on).

Under "campus living" I found one expert. For "transportation" I found two. There were three each for "housing" and "discrimination" and "elections." I found four each for "police" and "campus" and "drug." For "safety" I found 14! And "health" produced 35!

And you can filter by these general topic areas: agriculture and environment; arts and humanities; athletics; board and administration; business, economy, law and communications; education; family and social issues; health, medicine and veterinary medicine; international; science and technology; staff and faculty; students and campus life; tuition, costs and enrollment.Plus, there's always Google, right? And other schools as well. And think tanks. And private research institutions.

Wherever you find a good one, it's critical that you do. Journalism isn't about just getting both sides of the story. Getting one side and the other side and nothing else is just enabling a fight.

We're about trying to arrive at a verifiable version of the truth based on facts and checking out what people have to say, right? That's the role a neutral expert helps accomplish.

To paraphrase legendary baseball announcer and willful drunk Harry Caray -- and this might be the only smart thing he ever said in his life, God rest his soul -- there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

We need to get more than two out of three. We need all of 'em. And we need our out-of-class stories to cite AT LEAST one neutral expert!

So go find some neutral experts!

JRN 200: Imagine If ...

. . . if this story didn't have a neutral expert. Or two. A reader would just get two people arguing. And that's not journalism.

Journalism isn't about simply getting one side and the other side; it's about fact-testing the sides that are presented through the use of empirical evidence and expert testimony that helps make sense of what was said, and helps the reader determine what is true -- and what is not.

In this instance, the reporter didn't simply stop at reporting an argument over the Constitution between two politicians during a debate; rather the reporter went and found an expert in constitutional law who did NOT participate in the debate, to help answer what was right and wrong from the various positions claimed by the candidates.

And that completes journalism's true mission, which isn't simply to report the facts. Today, it's about helping the audience make sense of the facts, without partisan bias. 


Here's a link, and here's the text (with the neutral expert's passage highlighted. See the difference it makes?):

O'Donnell questions separation of church, state

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer 

WILMINGTON, Del. – Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.

Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion.

"She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise," Daly said. "It's one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment."

O'Donnell didn't respond to reporters who asked her to clarify her views after the debate.

During the exchange, she said Coons' views on creationism showed that he believes in big-government mandates.

"Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local schools," she said. "You've just proved how little you know not just about constitutional law but about the theory of evolution."

Coons said her comments show a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the Constitution.

The debate, their third in the past week, was more testy than earlier ones.

O'Donnell began by defending herself for not being able to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees at a debate last week. She said she was stumped because she largely agrees with the court's recent decisions under conservative chief justices John Roberts and William Rehnquist.

"I would say this court is on the right track," she said.

The two candidates repeatedly talked over each other, with O'Donnell accusing Coons of caving at one point when he asked the moderator to move on to a new question after a lengthy argument.

"I guess he can't handle it," she said.

O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal "addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse." 

Coons, who has held a double-digit lead in recent polls, urged voters to support him as the candidate of substance, with a track record over six years as executive of the state's most populous county. He said O'Donnell's only experience is in "sharpening the partisan divide but not at bridging it."

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All right

JRN 200: Neutral Experts

Today, I'm going to introduce a new concept that you'll need for completing your self-reported out-of-class stories. And that concept is that of neutral experts.

Neutral experts are people who have a great deal of knowledge and/or expertise regarding the subject you're writing about, but importantly they don't have an interest in the outcome. It's someone who can offer analysis that helps readers decide which side of an issue is more credible. In a one-sided story, it helps readers evaluate whether the people you're writing about are on the up and up.

Think of it in terms of a game: you normally have one side and the other side, right? How you view the game depends on which side you're on. Unless you have a referee, that is. A neutral expert is sort of a referee, helping point on when one side is telling the truth and the other side is stretching it a bit -- or a lot.

Let's say you're doing a story on a new business coming to East Lansing. You'd certainly talk to the business owner, but he or she has an interest in telling you positive stuff, since they own the biz. You can talk to rival businesses, but they have an interest in making themselves look better than the new guy. You can talk to shoppers who do have a valid viewpoint, but they are not expert at economic development.

That's where a neutral expert like, say, a business school prof  at MSU, can come in handy. That person doesn't have a stake in whether a business succeeds or fails, but they are expert at business, and can comment on the pros and cons not based on self-interest but rather on expertise. And that expertise helps a reader sort out all the competing perspectives, and decide which ones are credible and carry the most weight and relevance.


Most news stories at least attempt to include at least one neutral expert. And you can find a neutral expert about almost anything, no matter how obscure.

Let's look at this example: during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a lot was made about how the Obamas would fist-bump each other. The New York Times Sunday Magazine even did a story about it.

Here's how the story started:

Is this the end of high-five?  On the night in June that Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he and his wife, Michelle, exchanged what was variously described as a “closed-fist high five,” a “fist pound,” a “knuckle buckle” and a “fist jab.” Jonathan Tilove in The New Orleans Times-Picayune called the gesture “the dap heard ’round the world,” which he felt encapsulated “the new cultural trajectory of American politics.”

Believe it or not, they found an expert on fist-bumping. And that expert was right here. Let's continue the story:

Prof. Geneva Smitherman, director of African-American language study at Michigan State University, says: “Pound is when knuckles touch in a horizontal position. That’s the gesture that Michelle and Barack used. Dap is when the knuckles touch in a vertical position. Both gestures can be used as a greeting, to signal respect, agreement, bonding.” 

Dap started among black soldiers during the Vietnam War; to give “some dap” (not usually “a” dap) means “to offer kudos, congratulations”; Prof. James Peterson of Bucknell, a hip-hop historian, says he thinks it is rooted in dapper, “neat, fashionably smart.” Pound came out of hip-hop in the late 1980s. Fist bump came later: a 1996 note in the Sports Network wire service reported that Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles was accepting congratulations from baseball teammates with “high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.” Peterson says the new phrase robs the gesture of its cultural significance, which includes the Obamas’ “quiet but pronounced in-group affiliation with all of black America.”

Hand signals have a checkered history in politics, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s V-for-victory sign to the famed photo of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers to the clenched-fist salute of “black power” to Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for “pressing the flesh.” 

When Michelle Obama visited Barbara Walters on “The View” on ABC, the candidate’s wife sought to soften her image with “I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please. It is now my signature bump. . . . I got it from the young staff. That’s the new high-five.” 

Colleges are notorious for being loaded with neutral experts (think of all your profs doing research, and all the TA's working on their thesis papers!) So really, there's no excuse for you NOT to find a neutral expert, especially here or at other schools.

Like many other schools, MSU -- in hopes of getting free publicity -- even makes it easy to find experts. The MSU News Office's Web site has an experts list, which you can link to here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/Results/?

Just looking at the first page, these are just some of the topics for which MSU can find you a neutral expert: wind power, renewable energy, water preservation, breast cancer, breast cancer education, medical education, microfinance, filmmaking, documentary production, sensors and nano-bisensor devices for biodefense, health diagnostics and theraputics, child welfare, biblical references and history, Samartian population, meteorology and climatology, Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics, society and culture, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, school funding, school choice, school district building projects, the effects of mass communications, health communications, communications campaigns, international relations, the Middle East, Muslim issues, the early formation of galaxies, tax and expenditure policies, state and local public finance, poverty and income distribution, campus sustainability, Internet governance, new wireless technologies, telecommunications regulation and policy, bone and tissue engineering, labor markets, chaos theory, alternative dispute resolution, primitive stars, galaxy formation, labor unions and collective bargaining, international and domestic labor policy, work and family policy, flexible scheduling policy, tropical diseases, malaria, AIDS/HIV . . .

. . . and those are just a FEW of the subject areas!

You can also search by typing in a topic here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/

I took some general topics and looked for experts. Like Google, sometimes you have to try the same general term in different ways (like if you're searching for an expert in campus safety, you try that term, then campus, then safety, then police, and so on).

Under "campus living" I found one expert. For "transportation" I found two. There were three each for "housing" and "discrimination" and "elections." I found four each for "police" and "campus" and "drug." For "safety" I found 14! And "health" produced 35!

And you can filter by these general topic areas: agriculture and environment; arts and humanities; athletics; board and administration; business, economy, law and communications; education; family and social issues; health, medicine and veterinary medicine; international; science and technology; staff and faculty; students and campus life; tuition, costs and enrollment.Plus, there's always Google, right? And other schools as well. And think tanks. And private research institutions.

Wherever you find a good one, it's critical that you do. Journalism isn't about just getting both sides of the story. Getting one side and the other side and nothing else is just enabling a fight.

We're about trying to arrive at a verifiable version of the truth based on facts and checking out what people have to say, right? That's the role a neutral expert helps accomplish.

To paraphrase legendary baseball announcer and willful drunk Harry Caray -- and this might be the only smart thing he ever said in his life, God rest his soul -- there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

We need to get more than two out of three. We need all of 'em. And we need our out-of-class stories to cite AT LEAST one neutral expert!

So go find some neutral experts!

JRN 200: Imagine If ...

. . . if this story didn't have a neutral expert. Or two. A reader would just get two people arguing. And that's not journalism.

Journalism isn't about simply getting one side and the other side; it's about fact-testing the sides that are presented through the use of empirical evidence and expert testimony that helps make sense of what was said, and helps the reader determine what is true -- and what is not.

In this instance, the reporter didn't simply stop at reporting an argument over the Constitution between two politicians during a debate; rather the reporter went and found an expert in constitutional law who did NOT participate in the debate, to help answer what was right and wrong from the various positions claimed by the candidates.

And that completes journalism's true mission, which isn't simply to report the facts. Today, it's about helping the audience make sense of the facts, without partisan bias. 


Here's a link, and here's the text (with the neutral expert's passage highlighted. See the difference it makes?):

O'Donnell questions separation of church, state

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer 

WILMINGTON, Del. – Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.

Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion.

"She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise," Daly said. "It's one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment."

O'Donnell didn't respond to reporters who asked her to clarify her views after the debate.

During the exchange, she said Coons' views on creationism showed that he believes in big-government mandates.

"Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local schools," she said. "You've just proved how little you know not just about constitutional law but about the theory of evolution."

Coons said her comments show a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the Constitution.

The debate, their third in the past week, was more testy than earlier ones.

O'Donnell began by defending herself for not being able to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees at a debate last week. She said she was stumped because she largely agrees with the court's recent decisions under conservative chief justices John Roberts and William Rehnquist.

"I would say this court is on the right track," she said.

The two candidates repeatedly talked over each other, with O'Donnell accusing Coons of caving at one point when he asked the moderator to move on to a new question after a lengthy argument.

"I guess he can't handle it," she said.

O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal "addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse." 

Coons, who has held a double-digit lead in recent polls, urged voters to support him as the candidate of substance, with a track record over six years as executive of the state's most populous county. He said O'Donnell's only experience is in "sharpening the partisan divide but not at bridging it."

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc.

JRN 200: Neutral Experts

Today, I'm going to introduce a new concept that you'll need for completing your self-reported out-of-class stories. And that concept is that of neutral experts.

Neutral experts are people who have a great deal of knowledge and/or expertise regarding the subject you're writing about, but importantly they don't have an interest in the outcome. It's someone who can offer analysis that helps readers decide which side of an issue is more credible. In a one-sided story, it helps readers evaluate whether the people you're writing about are on the up and up.

Think of it in terms of a game: you normally have one side and the other side, right? How you view the game depends on which side you're on. Unless you have a referee, that is. A neutral expert is sort of a referee, helping point on when one side is telling the truth and the other side is stretching it a bit -- or a lot.

Let's say you're doing a story on a new business coming to East Lansing. You'd certainly talk to the business owner, but he or she has an interest in telling you positive stuff, since they own the biz. You can talk to rival businesses, but they have an interest in making themselves look better than the new guy. You can talk to shoppers who do have a valid viewpoint, but they are not expert at economic development.

That's where a neutral expert like, say, a business school prof  at MSU, can come in handy. That person doesn't have a stake in whether a business succeeds or fails, but they are expert at business, and can comment on the pros and cons not based on self-interest but rather on expertise. And that expertise helps a reader sort out all the competing perspectives, and decide which ones are credible and carry the most weight and relevance.


Most news stories at least attempt to include at least one neutral expert. And you can find a neutral expert about almost anything, no matter how obscure.

Let's look at this example: during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a lot was made about how the Obamas would fist-bump each other. The New York Times Sunday Magazine even did a story about it.

Here's how the story started:

Is this the end of high-five?  On the night in June that Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he and his wife, Michelle, exchanged what was variously described as a “closed-fist high five,” a “fist pound,” a “knuckle buckle” and a “fist jab.” Jonathan Tilove in The New Orleans Times-Picayune called the gesture “the dap heard ’round the world,” which he felt encapsulated “the new cultural trajectory of American politics.”

Believe it or not, they found an expert on fist-bumping. And that expert was right here. Let's continue the story:

Prof. Geneva Smitherman, director of African-American language study at Michigan State University, says: “Pound is when knuckles touch in a horizontal position. That’s the gesture that Michelle and Barack used. Dap is when the knuckles touch in a vertical position. Both gestures can be used as a greeting, to signal respect, agreement, bonding.” 

Dap started among black soldiers during the Vietnam War; to give “some dap” (not usually “a” dap) means “to offer kudos, congratulations”; Prof. James Peterson of Bucknell, a hip-hop historian, says he thinks it is rooted in dapper, “neat, fashionably smart.” Pound came out of hip-hop in the late 1980s. Fist bump came later: a 1996 note in the Sports Network wire service reported that Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles was accepting congratulations from baseball teammates with “high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.” Peterson says the new phrase robs the gesture of its cultural significance, which includes the Obamas’ “quiet but pronounced in-group affiliation with all of black America.”

Hand signals have a checkered history in politics, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s V-for-victory sign to the famed photo of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers to the clenched-fist salute of “black power” to Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for “pressing the flesh.” 

When Michelle Obama visited Barbara Walters on “The View” on ABC, the candidate’s wife sought to soften her image with “I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please. It is now my signature bump. . . . I got it from the young staff. That’s the new high-five.” 

Colleges are notorious for being loaded with neutral experts (think of all your profs doing research, and all the TA's working on their thesis papers!) So really, there's no excuse for you NOT to find a neutral expert, especially here or at other schools.

Like many other schools, MSU -- in hopes of getting free publicity -- even makes it easy to find experts. The MSU News Office's Web site has an experts list, which you can link to here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/Results/?

Just looking at the first page, these are just some of the topics for which MSU can find you a neutral expert: wind power, renewable energy, water preservation, breast cancer, breast cancer education, medical education, microfinance, filmmaking, documentary production, sensors and nano-bisensor devices for biodefense, health diagnostics and theraputics, child welfare, biblical references and history, Samartian population, meteorology and climatology, Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics, society and culture, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, school funding, school choice, school district building projects, the effects of mass communications, health communications, communications campaigns, international relations, the Middle East, Muslim issues, the early formation of galaxies, tax and expenditure policies, state and local public finance, poverty and income distribution, campus sustainability, Internet governance, new wireless technologies, telecommunications regulation and policy, bone and tissue engineering, labor markets, chaos theory, alternative dispute resolution, primitive stars, galaxy formation, labor unions and collective bargaining, international and domestic labor policy, work and family policy, flexible scheduling policy, tropical diseases, malaria, AIDS/HIV . . .

. . . and those are just a FEW of the subject areas!

You can also search by typing in a topic here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/

I took some general topics and looked for experts. Like Google, sometimes you have to try the same general term in different ways (like if you're searching for an expert in campus safety, you try that term, then campus, then safety, then police, and so on).

Under "campus living" I found one expert. For "transportation" I found two. There were three each for "housing" and "discrimination" and "elections." I found four each for "police" and "campus" and "drug." For "safety" I found 14! And "health" produced 35!

And you can filter by these general topic areas: agriculture and environment; arts and humanities; athletics; board and administration; business, economy, law and communications; education; family and social issues; health, medicine and veterinary medicine; international; science and technology; staff and faculty; students and campus life; tuition, costs and enrollment.Plus, there's always Google, right? And other schools as well. And think tanks. And private research institutions.

Wherever you find a good one, it's critical that you do. Journalism isn't about just getting both sides of the story. Getting one side and the other side and nothing else is just enabling a fight.

We're about trying to arrive at a verifiable version of the truth based on facts and checking out what people have to say, right? That's the role a neutral expert helps accomplish.

To paraphrase legendary baseball announcer and willful drunk Harry Caray -- and this might be the only smart thing he ever said in his life, God rest his soul -- there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

We need to get more than two out of three. We need all of 'em. And we need our out-of-class stories to cite AT LEAST one neutral expert!

So go find some neutral experts!

JRN 200: Imagine If ...

. . . if this story didn't have a neutral expert. Or two. A reader would just get two people arguing. And that's not journalism.

Journalism isn't about simply getting one side and the other side; it's about fact-testing the sides that are presented through the use of empirical evidence and expert testimony that helps make sense of what was said, and helps the reader determine what is true -- and what is not.

In this instance, the reporter didn't simply stop at reporting an argument over the Constitution between two politicians during a debate; rather the reporter went and found an expert in constitutional law who did NOT participate in the debate, to help answer what was right and wrong from the various positions claimed by the candidates.

And that completes journalism's true mission, which isn't simply to report the facts. Today, it's about helping the audience make sense of the facts, without partisan bias. 


Here's a link, and here's the text (with the neutral expert's passage highlighted. See the difference it makes?):

O'Donnell questions separation of church, state

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer 

WILMINGTON, Del. – Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.

Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion.

"She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise," Daly said. "It's one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment."

O'Donnell didn't respond to reporters who asked her to clarify her views after the debate.

During the exchange, she said Coons' views on creationism showed that he believes in big-government mandates.

"Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local schools," she said. "You've just proved how little you know not just about constitutional law but about the theory of evolution."

Coons said her comments show a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the Constitution.

The debate, their third in the past week, was more testy than earlier ones.

O'Donnell began by defending herself for not being able to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees at a debate last week. She said she was stumped because she largely agrees with the court's recent decisions under conservative chief justices John Roberts and William Rehnquist.

"I would say this court is on the right track," she said.

The two candidates repeatedly talked over each other, with O'Donnell accusing Coons of caving at one point when he asked the moderator to move on to a new question after a lengthy argument.

"I guess he can't handle it," she said.

O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal "addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse." 

Coons, who has held a double-digit lead in recent polls, urged voters to support him as the candidate of substance, with a track record over six years as executive of the state's most populous county. He said O'Donnell's only experience is in "sharpening the partisan divide but not at bridging it."

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All right

JRN 200: Neutral Experts

Today, I'm going to introduce a new concept that you'll need for completing your self-reported out-of-class stories. And that concept is that of neutral experts.

Neutral experts are people who have a great deal of knowledge and/or expertise regarding the subject you're writing about, but importantly they don't have an interest in the outcome. It's someone who can offer analysis that helps readers decide which side of an issue is more credible. In a one-sided story, it helps readers evaluate whether the people you're writing about are on the up and up.

Think of it in terms of a game: you normally have one side and the other side, right? How you view the game depends on which side you're on. Unless you have a referee, that is. A neutral expert is sort of a referee, helping point on when one side is telling the truth and the other side is stretching it a bit -- or a lot.

Let's say you're doing a story on a new business coming to East Lansing. You'd certainly talk to the business owner, but he or she has an interest in telling you positive stuff, since they own the biz. You can talk to rival businesses, but they have an interest in making themselves look better than the new guy. You can talk to shoppers who do have a valid viewpoint, but they are not expert at economic development.

That's where a neutral expert like, say, a business school prof  at MSU, can come in handy. That person doesn't have a stake in whether a business succeeds or fails, but they are expert at business, and can comment on the pros and cons not based on self-interest but rather on expertise. And that expertise helps a reader sort out all the competing perspectives, and decide which ones are credible and carry the most weight and relevance.


Most news stories at least attempt to include at least one neutral expert. And you can find a neutral expert about almost anything, no matter how obscure.

Let's look at this example: during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a lot was made about how the Obamas would fist-bump each other. The New York Times Sunday Magazine even did a story about it.

Here's how the story started:

Is this the end of high-five?  On the night in June that Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, he and his wife, Michelle, exchanged what was variously described as a “closed-fist high five,” a “fist pound,” a “knuckle buckle” and a “fist jab.” Jonathan Tilove in The New Orleans Times-Picayune called the gesture “the dap heard ’round the world,” which he felt encapsulated “the new cultural trajectory of American politics.”

Believe it or not, they found an expert on fist-bumping. And that expert was right here. Let's continue the story:

Prof. Geneva Smitherman, director of African-American language study at Michigan State University, says: “Pound is when knuckles touch in a horizontal position. That’s the gesture that Michelle and Barack used. Dap is when the knuckles touch in a vertical position. Both gestures can be used as a greeting, to signal respect, agreement, bonding.” 

Dap started among black soldiers during the Vietnam War; to give “some dap” (not usually “a” dap) means “to offer kudos, congratulations”; Prof. James Peterson of Bucknell, a hip-hop historian, says he thinks it is rooted in dapper, “neat, fashionably smart.” Pound came out of hip-hop in the late 1980s. Fist bump came later: a 1996 note in the Sports Network wire service reported that Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles was accepting congratulations from baseball teammates with “high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.” Peterson says the new phrase robs the gesture of its cultural significance, which includes the Obamas’ “quiet but pronounced in-group affiliation with all of black America.”

Hand signals have a checkered history in politics, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s V-for-victory sign to the famed photo of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers to the clenched-fist salute of “black power” to Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for “pressing the flesh.” 

When Michelle Obama visited Barbara Walters on “The View” on ABC, the candidate’s wife sought to soften her image with “I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please. It is now my signature bump. . . . I got it from the young staff. That’s the new high-five.” 

Colleges are notorious for being loaded with neutral experts (think of all your profs doing research, and all the TA's working on their thesis papers!) So really, there's no excuse for you NOT to find a neutral expert, especially here or at other schools.

Like many other schools, MSU -- in hopes of getting free publicity -- even makes it easy to find experts. The MSU News Office's Web site has an experts list, which you can link to here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/Results/?

Just looking at the first page, these are just some of the topics for which MSU can find you a neutral expert: wind power, renewable energy, water preservation, breast cancer, breast cancer education, medical education, microfinance, filmmaking, documentary production, sensors and nano-bisensor devices for biodefense, health diagnostics and theraputics, child welfare, biblical references and history, Samartian population, meteorology and climatology, Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics, society and culture, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, school funding, school choice, school district building projects, the effects of mass communications, health communications, communications campaigns, international relations, the Middle East, Muslim issues, the early formation of galaxies, tax and expenditure policies, state and local public finance, poverty and income distribution, campus sustainability, Internet governance, new wireless technologies, telecommunications regulation and policy, bone and tissue engineering, labor markets, chaos theory, alternative dispute resolution, primitive stars, galaxy formation, labor unions and collective bargaining, international and domestic labor policy, work and family policy, flexible scheduling policy, tropical diseases, malaria, AIDS/HIV . . .

. . . and those are just a FEW of the subject areas!

You can also search by typing in a topic here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/

I took some general topics and looked for experts. Like Google, sometimes you have to try the same general term in different ways (like if you're searching for an expert in campus safety, you try that term, then campus, then safety, then police, and so on).

Under "campus living" I found one expert. For "transportation" I found two. There were three each for "housing" and "discrimination" and "elections." I found four each for "police" and "campus" and "drug." For "safety" I found 14! And "health" produced 35!

And you can filter by these general topic areas: agriculture and environment; arts and humanities; athletics; board and administration; business, economy, law and communications; education; family and social issues; health, medicine and veterinary medicine; international; science and technology; staff and faculty; students and campus life; tuition, costs and enrollment.Plus, there's always Google, right? And other schools as well. And think tanks. And private research institutions.

Wherever you find a good one, it's critical that you do. Journalism isn't about just getting both sides of the story. Getting one side and the other side and nothing else is just enabling a fight.

We're about trying to arrive at a verifiable version of the truth based on facts and checking out what people have to say, right? That's the role a neutral expert helps accomplish.

To paraphrase legendary baseball announcer and willful drunk Harry Caray -- and this might be the only smart thing he ever said in his life, God rest his soul -- there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

We need to get more than two out of three. We need all of 'em. And we need our out-of-class stories to cite AT LEAST one neutral expert!

So go find some neutral experts!

JRN 200: Imagine If ...

. . . if this story didn't have a neutral expert. Or two. A reader would just get two people arguing. And that's not journalism.

Journalism isn't about simply getting one side and the other side; it's about fact-testing the sides that are presented through the use of empirical evidence and expert testimony that helps make sense of what was said, and helps the reader determine what is true -- and what is not.

In this instance, the reporter didn't simply stop at reporting an argument over the Constitution between two politicians during a debate; rather the reporter went and found an expert in constitutional law who did NOT participate in the debate, to help answer what was right and wrong from the various positions claimed by the candidates.

And that completes journalism's true mission, which isn't simply to report the facts. Today, it's about helping the audience make sense of the facts, without partisan bias. 


Here's a link, and here's the text (with the neutral expert's passage highlighted. See the difference it makes?):

O'Donnell questions separation of church, state

By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer 

WILMINGTON, Del. – Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.

Erin Daly, a Widener professor who specializes in constitutional law, said that while there are questions about what counts as government promotion of religion, there is little debate over whether the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from making laws establishing religion.

"She seemed genuinely surprised that the principle of separation of church and state derives from the First Amendment, and I think to many of us in the law school that was a surprise," Daly said. "It's one thing to not know the 17th Amendment or some of the others, but most Americans do know the basics of the First Amendment."

O'Donnell didn't respond to reporters who asked her to clarify her views after the debate.

During the exchange, she said Coons' views on creationism showed that he believes in big-government mandates.

"Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local schools," she said. "You've just proved how little you know not just about constitutional law but about the theory of evolution."

Coons said her comments show a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the Constitution.

The debate, their third in the past week, was more testy than earlier ones.

O'Donnell began by defending herself for not being able to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees at a debate last week. She said she was stumped because she largely agrees with the court's recent decisions under conservative chief justices John Roberts and William Rehnquist.

"I would say this court is on the right track," she said.

The two candidates repeatedly talked over each other, with O'Donnell accusing Coons of caving at one point when he asked the moderator to move on to a new question after a lengthy argument.

"I guess he can't handle it," she said.

O'Donnell, a tea party favorite who stunned the state by winning the GOP primary last month in her third Senate bid in five years, called Coons a liberal "addicted to a culture of waste, fraud and abuse." 

Coons, who has held a double-digit lead in recent polls, urged voters to support him as the candidate of substance, with a track record over six years as executive of the state's most populous county. He said O'Donnell's only experience is in "sharpening the partisan divide but not at bridging it."

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Neutral Experts: WTF Is That?

Today, I'm going to introduce a new concept that you'll need for completing your self-reported out-of-class stories. And that concept is that of neutral experts.

Neutral experts are people who have a great deal of knowledge and/or expertise regarding the subject you're writing about, but importantly they don't have an interest in the outcome. It's someone who can offer analysis that helps readers decide which side of an issue is more credible. In a one-sided story, it helps readers evaluate whether the people you're writing about are on the up and up.

Think of it in terms of a game: you normally have one side and the other side, right? How you view the game depends on which side you're on. Unless you have a referee, that is. A neutral expert is sort of a referee, helping point on when one side is telling the truth and the other side is stretching it a bit -- or a lot.

Let's say you're doing a story on a new business coming to East Lansing. You'd certainly talk to the business owner, but he or she has an interest in telling you positive stuff, since they own the biz. You can talk to rival businesses, but they have an interest in making themselves look better than the new guy. You can talk to shoppers who do have a valid viewpoint, but they are not expert at economic development.

That's where a neutral expert like, say, a business school prof  at MSU, can come in handy. That person doesn't have a stake in whether a business succeeds or fails, but they are expert at business, and can comment on the pros and cons not based on self-interest but rather on expertise. And that expertise helps a reader sort out all the competing perspectives, and decide which ones are credible and carry the most weight and relevance.


Most news stories at least attempt to include at least one neutral expert. And you can find a neutral expert about almost anything, no matter how obscure.

Let's look at this example: during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, a lot was made about how the Obamas would fist-bump each other. The New York Times Sunday Magazine even did a story about it.

Here's how the story started:

Is this the end of high-five? On the night in June that Barack Obamaclinched the Democratic nomination, he and his wife, Michelle, exchanged what was variously described as a “closed-fist high five,” a “fist pound,” a “knuckle buckle” and a “fist jab.” Jonathan Tilove in The New Orleans Times-Picayune called the gesture “the dap heard ’round the world,” which he felt encapsulated “the new cultural trajectory of American politics.”

Believe it or not, they found an expert on fist-bumping. And that expert was right here. Let's continue the story:

Prof. Geneva Smitherman, director of African-American language study at Michigan State University, says: “Pound is when knuckles touch in a horizontal position. That’s the gesture that Michelle and Barack used.Dap is when the knuckles touch in a vertical position. Both gestures can be used as a greeting, to signal respect, agreement, bonding.” 

Dap started among black soldiers during the Vietnam War; to give “some dap” (not usually “a” dap) means “to offer kudos, congratulations”; Prof. James Peterson of Bucknell, a hip-hop historian, says he thinks it is rooted in dapper, “neat, fashionably smart.” Pound came out of hip-hop in the late 1980s. Fist bump came later: a 1996 note in the Sports Network wire service reported that Eddie Murray of the Baltimore Orioles was accepting congratulations from baseball teammates with “high-fives, handshakes or fist bumps.” Peterson says the new phrase robs the gesture of its cultural significance, which includes the Obamas’ “quiet but pronounced in-group affiliation with all of black America.”

Hand signals have a checkered history in politics, from Prime MinisterWinston Churchill’s V-for-victory sign to the famed photo of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller “giving the finger” to hecklers to the clenched-fist salute of “black power” to Lyndon Johnson’s fondness for “pressing the flesh.”

When Michelle Obama visited Barbara Walters on “The View” on ABC, the candidate’s wife sought to soften her image with “I have to be greeted properly. Fist bump, please. It is now my signature bump. . . . I got it from the young staff. That’s the new high-five.” 

Colleges are notorious for being loaded with neutral experts (think of all your profs doing research, and all the TA's working on their thesis papers!) So really, there's no excuse for you NOT to find a neutral expert, especially here or at other schools.

Like many other schools, MSU -- in hopes of getting free publicity -- even makes it easy to find experts. The MSU News Office's Web site has an experts list, which you can link to here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/Results/?

Just looking at the first page, these are just some of the topics for which MSU can find you a neutral expert: wind power, renewable energy, water preservation, breast cancer, breast cancer education, medical education, microfinance, filmmaking, documentary production, sensors and nano-bisensor devices for biodefense, health diagnostics and theraputics, child welfare, biblical references and history, Samartian population, meteorology and climatology, Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Israeli politics, society and culture, international relations, U.S. foreign policy, school funding, school choice, school district building projects, the effects of mass communications, health communications, communications campaigns, international relations, the Middle East, Muslim issues, the early formation of galaxies, tax and expenditure policies, state and local public finance, poverty and income distribution, campus sustainability, Internet governance, new wireless technologies, telecommunications regulation and policy, bone and tissue engineering, labor markets, chaos theory, alternative dispute resolution, primitive stars, galaxy formation, labor unions and collective bargaining, international and domestic labor policy, work and family policy, flexible scheduling policy, tropical diseases, malaria, AIDS/HIV . . .

. . . and those are just a FEW of the subject areas!

You can also search by typing in a topic here: http://news.msu.edu/experts/

I took some general topics and looked for experts. Like Google, sometimes you have to try the same general term in different ways (like if you're searching for an expert in campus safety, you try that term, then campus, then safety, then police, and so on).

Under "campus living" I found one expert. For "transportation" I found two. There were three each for "housing" and "discrimination" and "elections." I found four each for "police" and "campus" and "drug." For "safety" I found 14! And "health" produced 35!

And you can filter by these general topic areas: agriculture and environment; arts and humanities; athletics; board and administration; business, economy, law and communications; education; family and social issues; health, medicine and veterinary medicine; international; science and technology; staff and faculty; students and campus life; tuition, costs and enrollment.Plus, there's always Google, right? And other schools as well. And think tanks. And private research institutions.

Wherever you find a good one, it's critical that you do. Journalism isn't about just getting both sides of the story. Getting one side and the other side and nothing else is just enabling a fight.

We're about trying to arrive at a verifiable version of the truth based on facts and checking out what people have to say, right? That's the role a neutral expert helps accomplish.

To paraphrase legendary baseball announcer and willful drunk Harry Caray -- and this might be the only smart thing he ever said in his life, God rest his soul -- there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

We need to get more than two out of three. We need all of 'em. And we need our out-of-class stories to cite AT LEAST one neutral expert!

So go find some neutral experts!