387 paper assignment / D R A F T

Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift once said, "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

Reviewing a theater adaptation of "Lucky You" for Broadway.com , Beau Higgins says Hiaasen's columns at The Miami Herald "have outraged just about everyone in South Florida, including major politicians, law officials and even his own bosses." In "Lucky You," his targets include South Florida developers, religious quacks, redneck militias, white liberals, Hooters and, yes, the newspaper business.

Research Hiaasen, his journalism and his novels. Based on that research and your reading of "Lucky You," write a documented feature article

How does "Lucky You" reflect the ethics of a working journalist? What media trends, practices, etc. does he satirize? What would you consider the moral center of his work?

Hold it down to 1,500 words.




"A Brief Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth Century Satire," lecture delivered by Ian Johnston in November 1998, in English 200, Section 3, Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/Eng200/satire3.htm

COMM 387: Draft goals and objectives

A. Goals Students will understand the historical development of professional journalism in England and the United States; appraise ethics, principles and craftsmanship in authors who made the transition from journalism to literature; assess the professional ethics, attitudes and craft agenda of professional journalists writing today; and reflect on how these principles and practices can inform their own professional writing.

B. Student Learning Objectives. Upon completion of the course, students will be able:

To discuss the development of journalism in the English-speaking world, from 18th-century magazines to the 19th-century penny press, "yellow journalism," muckraking and professional mass-market news media during the 19th to 21st centuries

To formulate a set of journalistic ethical standards and values, including such principles as accuracy, the verification of fact, objectivity, serving as a watchdog and exposing wrongdoing in powerful institutions; and to compare these values to commonly accepted benchmarks of literary value

To discuss and evaluate common stereotypes of journalists, including those of Ben Hecht [as reflected in His Girl Friday (1940) starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant]; Hunter Thompson; and Carl Hiassen, novelist and Miami Herald columnist.

To evaluate the work of literary figures including Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway in terms of values, principles and rhetorical strategies they may have acquired as journalists

To evaluate the work of journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Ernie Pyle, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Mike Royko and Robert Fisk in light of both journalistic and literary standards and rhetorical strategies

To reflect on how the values, principles and work product of journalists from 18th-century London coffeehouses to creative nonfiction markets today can help in the formation of their own personal and professional values and principles; and how some of the techniques studied might (or might not) be reflected in their own professional writing

Bloom's taxonomy -- skills-based, too

The Faculty Center for Teaching and E-Learning at the University of North Carolina Charlotte has Bloom's Taxonomy Objectives for skills-based courses as well as the cognitive domain. Also the affective domain. One to come back to.

J-blogs: Weblogs for J-school students?

After talking with a couple of students in the news-editorial sequence during finals, I'm going to start posting links to information about how journalism students might use a blog to enhance their careers. The conventional wisdom, at least in academic life, is to stay away from them. Up-and-coming professors have been denied tenure, at least so go the scare stories, because of controversy over their blogs. Middle East expert Juan Cole, who makes no secret of his utter distain for neo-conservative foreign policy, is often cited as an example. So be careful. Be especially careful of satire -- if readers can take something the wrong way, they will. Count on it. They most assuredly will.

But my instinct is certain kinds of blogs might be helpful to people just getting started in the business. ...

Especially appropriate for student journalists, perhaps, would be something like a writer's journal. This is one of those terms that means different things to different people. What I mean by a writer's journal is kind of like a notebook professional writers use to try out ideas, post observations, etc. Something, in other words, an awful lot like the blogs I had my students start fall semester in COMM 337 (advanced writing). Another warning: Don't post finished articles, or even nearly-finished articles, to your blog. Free-lance markets, as a rule, won't touch anything that's been published before. And a few of them might count your blog as a prior publication.

Again, be careful. It's a big, wide, wonderful, dangerous world out there. And the Internet is no less dangerous (and no more) than the rest of it. But you already knew that. Right?

The Helium.com writers' community website collects 15 articles under the heading Tips for keeping a journal like a professional writer. I haven't read them all, but they look very useful. I checked a couple of third-party ratings in an
Pandia Search Engine News webpage and a members' forum with comments by users at Editred.org web. Helium seems kosher, especially for beginners, but not a good way of making money by free-lancing. But in my experience nothing else is, either!

A website called the Internet Writing Journal maintains a list of "The Best Author Blogs" ... check them out. You may find something that's suited

Infed.org is a website put together by a small group of British educators who use it for "exploring informal education, lifelong learning and social action." They have a useful tip sheet "Writing and Keeping Journals" for teachers and education students.

How a band uses 'sticky' website

A band mixing the sound of Afropop, hip hop, soul and, yes, I can hear a little gospel, Soulfège is based in Boston, now doing a Sweet Mother Africa tour. Infectious music.

Also an awesome example of a band using new media. You've read about "sticky" websites? (If you're not sure, see below.) Well, this is how a well-thought-out sticky website works. Here's the band, in their own words:

So what is Soulfège? Glad you asked. Put it like this - if Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Lenny Kravitz and Gwen Stefani were all jammin' with the same band, it would be this one.

Fusing funk, reggae, hip-hop, and highlife, Soulfège is more than a band...it's a big FUNKY band.

Electrifying audiences, from Boston to Ghana and beyond, with its positive vibe and relentless groove, the members of Soulfège have performed with and for some of the world's most talented artists and distinguished dignitaries, including Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Bobby McFerrin, Nelson Mandela, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornell West, and Al Gore.

The group is known for building sonic bridges that fuse the influences of the African Diaspora into a musical vision all its own. Soulfège not only shines with creativity, it thrills audiences with a golden foundation in rhythm and harmony.

In general, the band tries to present a positive view of life and of culture, both American and African. Frontman Derrick N. Ashong, who is from Ghana, told The Boston Globe the band "was in a position to help change misperceptions on both sides." Says Daniel T. Swann of the Globe:

Soulfege has one foot in Africa, one in America. Its core members -- Ashong, Jonathan M. Gramling, and Kelley Nicole Johnson -- were brought together by their alma mater, Harvard, where all had been in the Kuumba Singers, a gospel choir. But Ashong was born in Ghana, and many of the band's lyrics reflect a connection to the African diaspora. "Yaa (dis be fo radio)," for example, includes lyrics in Ga (spoken in Ghana), as well as in Portuguese and English.

Plenty of YouTube clips and other eye candy -- ear candy? -- on their website. Quotes from and links to the Globe's laudatory story on the band and the SMA tour.

Here's how Erin Jansen's NetLingo.com website defines sticky content:

Information or features on a Web site that gives users a compelling reason to revisit it frequently. Stickiness is also gauged by the amount of time spent at a Web site over a given period of time. This is often maximized by getting the user to leave some information behind on the site, such as a personal profile, an investment portfolio, a resume, a list of preferred cities for weather reports, personal horoscopes, birthday reminders, and the like.

How many sticky features do you see on the Soulfège website? How many do you see on NetLingo, for that matter?

COMM 337 -- final exam

COMM 337: Advanced Journalistic Writing
Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken

Final Examination – Due at 1:30 p.m., Wed., Dec. 5

The Principles of Journalism adopted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, available at http://www.journalism.org/, say telling the truth “is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.” But words like truth tend to make working journalists nervous. So they tend not to use them. In her autobiographical book “Small Blessings,” Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “newspapering is dedicated to something important – letting the people know.” Sibley, who covered courts, the legislature and major stories like the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, said she did it once with “a straightforward recital of the facts, devoid of feeling” (170-172). The story won a prize. And Donald Murray, author of our textbook “Writing to Deadline,” recalled his first prize-winning story, about a suicidal jumper on a window ledge: “I followed the specific detail – the terrifying chant of the crowd [‘Jump! Jump!’ Jump!’]. … I wrote the story with information – specific, revealing details and direct quotations. I didn’t attempt ‘great’ writing, I just tried to get out of the way of the horrifying information” (6). Murray, like Sibley, doesn’t use the word truth. Instead, he speaks of specific details, details and facts.

“I was told [as a reporter] and then learned by public attack and embarrassment that it was worse to spell the name wrong than to charge a person with public lewdness,” Murray adds. “If you got the name of the street wrong, no one trusted anything in the story.” So telling the truth is about getting the facts straight and presenting them to readers with enough context so they can understand them. Write a 1,000- to 1,500-word essay answering these questions:
How important is truthfulness to journalistic ethics? How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques, like seeking out surprise or avoiding clichés of vision, and his techniques for telling a story -- finding the “line,” explaining context and organizing a story around a clear narrative – help us get the facts straight and communicate them to our readers? How can they help you in your own writing?

What do other working journalists, or former journalists like Robert Fisk of The [London] Independent and those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth? How can this help you in your own writing?
In reporting and writing your feature stories for Communications 337, what did you learn about interviewing people, getting the facts straight, understanding them in context and putting it all into words on paper (or pixels on a screen) so a reader could understand them? How can it help you as a professional writer?

COMM 337: Quote w/in quote w/in quote

Posted to my mass communications blogs. --pe

The CNN story was headlined "Why bad kissers don't get to second base." Cute enough. Worth a look. But what I really liked about it was the punctuation in the last 'graph! Take a look:

"The best kisses are always the ones that happen accidentally," observes New York City resident Benjamin Kayne, 25, a digital media sales director. "(Planned kisses) are just tedious, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Is this over yet? The commercial is over and I'm missing "CSI".' "

That's a quote within a quote within a quote. That you don't see every day.

COMM 337: How much extra credit ... ?

... should I give you if you cite the article linked below in your final exam for COMM 337?

Email me and let me know what you think. That way I'll know you visited the website during final exam week, even if you don't quote the article linked below in your essay on truth, facts and the responsiblities of a journalist.

But I think you'll find something to think about.

It's an opinion piece in today's New York Times by Clark Hoyt, the "readers' representative" columnist for The Times. Headline is "Fact and Fiction on the Campaign Trail." Interested yet? Facts.

Well, try this. Hoyt's lede:

LAST Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.

“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.

In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.

If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.

OK, OK, a couple of political candidates trashing each other. Happens all the time. But I columnist for The New York Times saying his paper let him down? Now that is news.

No. It's not news, it's ethics.

So who's telling the truth? Says Hoyt:

My colleague Michael McElroy came up with the facts that morning after a 10-minute check of F.B.I. statistics readily available on the Internet. Murder in Massachusetts did go up in the four years Romney was governor, from 173 in 2002, the year before he took office, to 186 in 2006, the last full year of his term. An increase of 13 murders may not seem like a crime wave in a state with a population of 6.4 million, but an increase is an increase, so Giuliani was right on that point.

But violent crime, a broader category made up of murder, rape, robbery and assault, went down in the Romney era, from 31,137 to 28,775, so Giuliani was wrong on that score and the Romney campaign was right, though it failed to mention that robberies had also increased.

Both of them. Neither one of them.

Getting the facts in context is a little harder. Ten minutes harder, to be precise. How difficult can that be?

Something else. Hoyt quotes people who say fact-checking can have a good effect on the political process, and several news organizations in fact (there's that word again) do a lot of it:

Fact-checking the candidates has long been an important part of campaign coverage. When news organizations blow the whistle on false statements by candidates, it tends to have an impact, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “I think it’s an extremely valuable role, keeping the players honest.”

Is that worth 10 minutes of a reporter's time?

Spring semester internship opportunity

Project Return, an ecumenical social service program that works with mothers returning to the Springfield community from prison, can use an intern to work with the director in creating or updating a flier, newsletter, website or other promotional material. (More details below copied and pasted from their informational flier.) They are expanding their services and community education efforts, and this would a good experience for an intern who already has some motivation toward social justice issues and an interest in public relations. Internships are open to mass communications students at Benedictine who have a 3.0 average or better.

The intern would work with my wife Debi Edmund, who is Project Return's new director. Before seeking her master's degree in Child and Family Services at the Univerity of Illinois-Springfield, she was a public relations consultant for the Illinois Association of School Boards and is a former features editor of The Rock Island Argus (where I met her). So she is an experienced communications professional who has combined her mass comm. skills with another line of work.

PROJECT RETURN
Our Mission
Project Return’s mission is to help incarcerated mothers reintegrate into the Springfield community by matching each returning mother with a team of trained and supported volunteers for one year. We also educate the public about the barriers these women face as they seek to make a successful re-entry into the community.

Our Program
Paid staff and trained volunteer Partnership Teams help participants address immediate challenges: complying with the conditions of parole, achieving financial stability, finding immediate and permanent housing, accessing health care, reconnecting with family and friends, and resuming parental responsibilities. Without such support, released inmates are at risk of returning to criminal activity, substance abuse, or other self-defeating behaviors. Project Return hopes to break that cycle, benefiting both the clients and the community. Our comprehensive, individualized re-entry services begin prior to the individual’s release and continue for up to a year after release. Services include assistance in finding or accessing short term and permanent housing, employment, education or employment training, child care, health care, mental health care, counseling and addiction support services, reliable transportation and safety net resources. It is hoped that each participant will leave our program with improved self-esteem, better mental and physical health, and increased self-sufficiency, thus reducing the chances that she will re-offend and return to prison.

COMM 337: Truth & Project for Excellence in Journalism

The Project for Excellence in Journalism defines itself as "a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press." Originally affiliated with the Columbia School of Journalism, one of the nation's best, is is now part of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Focusing especially on content analysis, the PEJ maintains a website with daily updates on the state of the media. It also posts a Statement of Shared Purpose listing nine principles developed by research project that included 40 forums with working journalists over a four-year period. Among them are several that relate to this question of truth ... including the first principle:

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth
Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can--and must--pursue it in a practical sense. This "journalistic truth" is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation. Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built--context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The truth, over time, emerges from this forum. As citizens encounter an ever greater flow of data, they have more need--not less--for identifiable sources dedicated to verifying that information and putting it in context.

Notice how the journalists at PEJ's forums think of truth as a process -- if you do it right, in so many words, you'll get it right.

All nine of the principles are important. Of special interest to us in COMM 337, perhaps, is the seventh:

It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. For its own survival, it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society.

You will have an opportunity to write about these issues on your final exam. How do the reporting and writing techniques in Donald Murray's "Writing to Deadline" empower us as journalists to tell the truth and get it right.

COMM 337: More viewpoints on truth (and a final exam hint)

If you start looking for the truth, I'm discovering, it turns out everybody's got an opinion on it. And their brother, their sister, their second cousin once removed and their cocker spaniel puppy, too. (Well, maybe that's not 100 percent true about the cocker spaniel puppy.) But I think it is important. And I think this issue of telling the truth can tie together several things we've touched on in COMM 337:

• How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques -- e.g. looking for surprise, his interview tips, etc. -- help us learn the truth as reporters?
  
• How do his techniques for telling a story -- finding the "line," explaining context, etc. -- help us communicate the truth to our readers?
  
• What do other working journalists, or former journalists like those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth?
  
• How important is telling the truth to journalistic ethics? Where do you draw the line in an age of shrinking newspaper readership and declining audiences for "mainstream" (i.e. network style) TV news?

Here are some resources I found on the internet:

The current issue (Fall '07) of San José State University's alumni magazine, Washington Square Magazine, asked students and faculty there "What is truth?" Three definitions stood out:

Thomas Leddy, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, said the kind of thing you'd expect a philosopher to say. Abstract, hard to follow, but kinda well reasoned once you think about it a while:

Truth is a triune concept, all sides in constant, necessary, often fruitful, and often harmful conflict. One side expresses the one-to-one fit of elements between the candidate for truth (proposition, picture, etc.) and that to which it is said to be true. The second is best expressed by William James’ idea that truth is that which is good in the way of believing. The third is the quality of heightened reality we experience when we believe we have captured the essence of something (e.g., conceptually or through art). None of these is reducible to any of the others.

Much more practical were the defintions from business and journalism profs. Michael Solt, an associate dean in the Lucas Graduate School of Business, said:

A dictionary definition of truth includes concepts like honesty, integrity, accuracy and conformity with fact. Students, and especially business professionals, understand that long-term success is dependent on such truth. Recent accounting scandals show how short-term deviations from truthfulness do come to light with severe consequences. I am very impressed with how Silicon Valley professionals, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, embody these concepts in their daily behavior. While reputation and credibility play a role, I get the sense they believe that “doing the right thing” is actually the best thing for their organizations.

There's plenty there for journalists as well as business people to wrestle with. Best of all (of course), I liked what Richard Craig, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, defined truth and operationalized it:

Truth is the facts about a situation. Unfortunately, life can take something as seemingly simple as that and complicate it enormously. Do the details of an incident obscure its root causes? Do certain actions contradict previous behaviors or disguise possible consequences? For a journalist, truth is often something that must be unearthed. It’s frequently elusive and sometimes unpleasant, but it’s a reporter’s stock in trade. It emerges when a journalist genuinely works to produce a fair and complete account. It seems somehow appropriate—for journalists, truth is the result of an honest effort.

Now this ...

I think I'm going to offer this without comment. It's a Reuters story on two Iraq war documentaries. Here's the lede:

LONDON (Reuters) - Two Hollywood directors who are part of a wave of films about the war in Iraq and the broader fallout from the September 11, 2001 attacks have said they were only doing what media failed to do -- telling the truth.

Brian De Palma's "Redacted", arguably the most shocking feature yet about events in Iraq, hits theatres on Friday, using a documentary style to tell the true story of the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by U.S. troops in 2006.

Paul Haggis also based "In The Valley Of Elah", already released, on true events linked to the war, although, unlike De Palma's cast of unknown actors, he employed major stars Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon.

What jumped off the page -- uh, off the screen -- at me was those last three words in the first graf, "... telling the truth."

Read the story. It's short. And while I don't have any particular comment about, I do have some questions:

1. How would De Palma, Haggis and the others quoted in the story define the truth?

2. How do they documentary filmmakers go about seeking the truth (however they define it)?

3. What marketplace pressures make it difficult to tell the truth?

Media, 'context' in Springfield / READING ASSIGNMENT

This morning's issue of Illinois Times has a cover story and a couple of sidebars on the state of the news media. They fit in with the discussion we're having in a couple of my news-editorial classes, and they're important enough I'm assigning them to all of my mass comm. students. Read them, and be ready to cite them in class discussions, on your blogs and/or your final exam essays. You can pick up a free copy of IT from the newsrack next to the Quiet Lounge in Dawson, or read it on IT's website They tell about the pressure of declining circulation, ownership changes and a gloomy job outlook at The State Journal-Register and WICS Channel 20. All this makes it difficult, according to some of the people quoted, to do a decent, ethical job of covering the news -- writing "the best obtainable version of the truth" in Carl Bernstein's words -- in the dominant media in town. More specialized, or "niche," media in the African-American community and public radio are doing better, according to the sidebars.

There's nothing new in the doom and gloom. Ben Bagdikian, a former Washington Post editor now dean emeritus of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkley, summed it up 40 years ago when he said, "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer."

True enough (there's that word again). But you've got to try.

This week's stories in Illinois Times tell how things are shaking out here lately, and they're not just for students who want to go into the news business. The trends are national, and they're important for everyone who deals with -- or reads, watches, listens to or surfs -- the media. Which is all of us.

A sidelight. In Amanda Parsons' story on local TV news, there's a little preview of what Benedictine students can expect from Nathan Mihelich, who will teach TV production spring semester. Formerly a Channel 20 reporter, Mihelich is now information director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. Says the IT story:

Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.

Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.

Bernstein (Marqueta)

Marqueta's post -- moved from last year's COMM 207 blog. -- pe.

"I don’t think that we are going to have such a salutary view of what happened in the Clinton presidency. Clinton’s transgressions have little in common with Watergate, which was about a vast and pervasive abuse of power by a criminal president, who ordered break-ins and firebombings, who impeded the free electoral process, who instituted illegal wiretaps and used the Internal Revenue Service as a force for personal retribution...

I was talking about, about what we do. The rise of idiot culture, which we must resist, is taking place at a time when other institutions in this society, particularly our political institutions, particularly the American Congress, have been failing us, pandering even more shamefully to polls instead of engaging in problem-solving; responding to campaign contributions instead of to the real problems, fears, needs of the people of the country; surrendering too often to demagoguery and irrelevance instead of leading the people"

Berstein is a very 'real' reporter. He speaks on the things that Elite America runs from. Berstein talked about context. I believe that context in this sense deals with 'the given'.

COMM 337: Are reporters doomed? Well, maybe ...

David Leigh, an assistant editor of the Guardian in London, with special responsibility for investigative reporting, has some glum thoughts for those who don't think newspapering is a dying industry. His headline sums up the tone of the speech: "Are reporters doomed?" His answer. Read it for yourself and make your own conclusion. But I'd say his answer is yes, probably. Says Leigh:

I fear that these developments [various forms of online publication and blogging] will endanger the role of the reporter. Of course, there will always be a need for news bunnies who can dash in front of a camera and breathlessly describe a lorry crash, or bash out a press release in 10 minutes. There will probably be a lot more news bunnies in the future. There will probably also be hyper-local sites — postcode journalism fuelled cheaply by neighbourhood bloggers. But not proper reporters.

You probably figured out how to translate from the British yourself. But a "lorry" is a truck, and British "postcodes" are like our ZIP codes. "News bunnies" needs no translation. But "high street" might be less familiar -- it's like "Main Street" in small-town America.

COMM 337: Journalism and capital-T truth

Cross-posted from this semester's class blog in COMM 207 (copy editing). It takes up a question we also mentioned in our class Monday: How can we know what the truth is? The answer here, in so many words, is we can't but we obtain something that's pretty close to it if we try hard enough.

So read this post, follow the links and be ready to answer the questions below in boldface. We'll try it in class, and if discussion lags you'll have an opportunity to write about it on your blogs. -- pe

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story during the 1970s, has a definition that I've liked ever since I first came across it in our copyediting textbook, Modern News Editing by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore (5th ed. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005). Journalism, according to Bernstein, is "the best obtainable version of the truth" (231). Ludwig and Gilmore add it's "an acknowledgement that the full truth is hard to grab hold of and may shift over time as more facts are revealed."

Turns out Bernstein has been saying it for years. Especially after he and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward were portrayed in the Hollywood movie "All the President's Men" (1976), Bernstein has been a fixture on the rubber-chicken dinner and lecture circuit. And he gives this definition of journalism to audience after audience. Usually he says it's being undermined by celebrity news and cost-cutting in U.S. newsrooms.

It makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to a lot of people who have covered the news, and who know from the experience how elusive the truth can be. I like it because it doesn't promise too much. It doesn't promise The Truth with a capital "T."

"Truth is the word that summarizes many journalistic ideas," say Ludwig and Gilmore. "But what, philosopy has always asked, is Truth? Working newsmen and newswomen know what truth means on the job and don't worry too much about the big picture, so far as they can discover and portray it." The best obtainable version, in other words, of truth.

Ironically, Bernstein credits Woodward with the phrase. When the two were interviewed by Larry King of CNN, they said:

... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.

BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.

They went on from there, on "Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."

In seeking the best obtainable truth, Ludwig and Gilmore suggest journalists look for several things.

The most important is accuracy. "Newsrooms rightly develop a fixation on accuracy about names and addresses. But reporters must be at least as careful about accurate quotation, or about the accuracy of the impression that results from the way facts are put together."

Almost as important is objectivity. Ludwig and Gilmore cite the conventional wisdom: "Reporters should keep themselves out of the story, and editors should see that they do."

Closely related to accuracy and objectivity is fairness. Ludwig and Gilmore have a simple standard for editors: "They treat everybody alike."

Bernstein's rubber-chicken dinner speech, as he gave it Sept. 26, 1998, at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is available on line. In it he says:

The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.

How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:

The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.

Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.

It's all about process. When you don't know whether people are telling you the truth or not, what affirmative steps can you take to ensure accuracy, objectivity and fairness? My old city editor used to say, "Pete, if your dear old white-haired grandmother tells you she loves you, don't believe her! Check it out!" Is that a reasonable attitude? What other steps can you take? What would Don Murray (author of the little green book that won't go away) recommend? What do you recommend?

COMM 393: RE: Senior Portfolios/due dates reflective essay

When you get your formal assignment sheets in Communications 393 (Senior Portfolio), I'll elaborate on the due date for the self-reflective essay that goes with the senior portfolio. But I'm also sending out an email message now giving you a heads-up on it, so you can plan ahead.

The self-reflective essays papers are due Monday, Nov. 26, the first day of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before finals. Email them to me at pellertsen@sci.edu and/or peterellertsen@yahoo.com ... please also include a paper copy of the self-reflective essay in the Senior Portfolio Folder that you leave with me during our end-of-semester conference. I will schedule them later.

2. During the rest of that week, from Tuesday, Nov. 27, through Friday, Nov. 30, I will accept late papers but deduct 10 points -- i.e. a letter grade -- from the grade on the paper.

3. During the week of final exams, I will deduct another five points for each additional day the paper is late -- for a total of 15 points Monday, Dec. 3; 20 points Tuesday, Dec. 4; 25 points Wednesday, Dec. 5; 30 points Thursday, Dec. 6; and 35 points Friday, Dec. 7.

I don't like deducting points for late papers, especially for college seniors. But a few of the students who are registered for COMM 393 have been so irregular in their attendance, I believe I need to set clear deadlines and penalties. In order not to discriminate against anybody, I am obligated to set the same policies for everyone.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don't hestitate to contact me.

-- Pete Ellertsen, instructor, COMM 393

COMM 337: Assignment for Nov. 16

The following assignment sheet, together with a hard copy of the article in the Nov. 1, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, will be handed out in class tomorrow. Students who are absent that day are responsible for securing a copy of the article, either from me or from a library that takes Rolling Stone. -- pe

COMM 337: Beyond Newswriting
Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken

Fourth analytical paper (due Friday, Nov. 16). Attached is a profile of environmental scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone. It was written by Jeff Goodell, who writes for that magazine and the New York Times Magazine, on the basis of several interviews with Lovelock in Norway and in England. Analyze his story in terms of its news value – timeliness, impact or importance, etc. – and Goodell’s organization and narrative technique.

What is the main point of Goodell’s story? Does he have a nut graf? If so, be sure to quote it. Where is it? If not, how and where does Goodell let his readers know the main point of the story? How does he organize the interviews with Lovelock to support that point? In discussing the things that keep a story moving, Donald Murray, author of our textbook Writing to Deadline, speaks of conflict and tension. "That tension may be between one individual and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). How does Goodell develop that tension in this story?

How effective is the story as a whole? Is it newsworthy? Does Goodell develop it so it would interest readers in a general interest magazine like Rolling Stone? Consulting Don Murray’s "Notes on Narrative" (152-55), analyze Goodell’s story for its mastery of the story-teller's art. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. How effective is the story’s ending? Does the rest of the story fully prepare readers for the end?

Please tell Michelle and Christina

... that I'm trying to send them senior portfolio information by email, but the message bounced.

Thanks a million!

-- Doc

COMM 393: Reminder on Senior Portfolios

A copy of an email message I sent out this morning to students registered for Communications 393. I'm posting it to my blogs for communications students as well. I have great respect for the Benedictine/SCI grapevine, and I'll appreciate your assistance in getting the word out. -- pe.

A reminder: The end of the semester is only a month away, so it's time to pull together the material for your senior portfolios.

I will need to meet with each of you in order to: (1) inspect your professional portfolio; and (2) receive a Senior Portfolio Folder containing your self-reflective paper and copies of four pieces of work (artifacts) you have done for class, for internships and/or off-campus publications. You will keep your professional portfolio for use in job hunting, but Benedictine University will retain a Senior Portfolio Folder from each student for program assessment purposes.

I am developing a more detailed set of instructions, which I hope to email to you over the weekend, but I wanted to send out this reminder so you can get started how.

THERE ARE THREE parts to the Senior Portfolio procedure:

I. SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY. To be turned in, as part of the Senior Portfolio Folder, during a conference with me before the end of the semester.

The self-reflective essay will be 10 to 12 pages in length, in which you reflect on your experience as a communications major at Benedictine in terms of: (a) your progress toward developing or furthering your career goals; (b) your understanding of the profession, its ethics and its role in society. In this essay you should address the following program objectives of Benedictine's mass communications department:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;

2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;

3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;

4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;

5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;

6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;

7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;

8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;

9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;

10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;

11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;

12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;

13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and

14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

II. PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO. To be inspected by me during our end-of-semester conference and returned to you. This will be a collection of your best work, preferably gathered in a presentation folder, that you can take with you on job interviews.

III. SENIOR PORTFOLIO FOLDER. To be turned in to me during our end-of-semester conference and retained by Benedictine. Since we will keep these folders, I will accept them in an inexpensive pocketed folder; you can find them in an office supply store or the school supplies aisle of most drug stores. In this folder, you will include: (a) the the self-reflective essay; and (b) at least one copy at least one piece of work (artifact) from each of the following categories:

1. A 300-level research paper written for a 300-level theory class (including COMM 317, 385, 386, 387, or 390, and 391 if it is a theory class). It must contain proper annotation, structure, evidence, and methodology. The student must have attained a grade of at least a “B” on the paper in its original form for it to be accepted for this requirement.

2. A print-based publication, defined as an original written or produced work fixed in a printed and published medium (including newspapers, magazines and newsletters). If you do not have print publication credits, class work for COMM 207, 208, 209, 253 (equivalent to SCI's COM 221), 254, 263 (equivalent to SCI's COM 222), 264, 337, 381 or 382 can be accepted.

3. A web-based publication, i.e. creation that has been exhibited on the World Wide Web and is created for a departmental publication, internship, or work-related experience. The Sleepy Weasel counts as a web-based publication. Any other web-based artifact, including blogs or personal Web pages, must be approved by the instructor prior to the submission of the full portfolio.

4. Brochures, fliers, memos or other work product, including advertisements, pamphlets, brochures, letterheads, scripts or other copy prepared for broadcast, memos, creative briefs, campaign plans or other tangible material written in connection with a college course or an internship.

I will send you a formal assignment sheet in a few days, and there is more detail available about the senior portfolios on the COMM 393 syllabus linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/masscom/comm393syllabus.html

If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

-- Pete "Doc" Ellertsen, instructor

COMM 337:

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "PUBLIC SERVICE." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award. It will say:

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material, a gold medal.

Two Prizes of a gold medal each:

Awarded to the Sun Herald, Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.

and:

Awarded to The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.

Click on the gray tab that says "Works" and then on the link to The Times-Picayune's winning stories. Please note: This is a DIFFERENT batch of stories from the selection I asked you to read and analyze for Friday's assignment. Start now, because the computers are slow today.

Howard Kurtz on perceived media bias

Cross-posted to my mass communications blogs. -- pe

There's a story in yesterday's Washington Post that we need to read, even though it relates to material we covered earlier in the semester and/or will come back to at semester's end. It's a column by media critic Howard Kurtz on right- and left-wing perceptions of bias in the news media. To sum it up briefly, maybe a little too briefly, Kurtz thinks the media are taking fire from both sides. And he implies, without coming right out and saying it, that's about where you want to be if you're covering the news.

Kurtz has been on the talk show circuit plugging his book on network news, and he said the talk show hosts "appear to be living in parallel universes." His column is a good overview of the issue, concluding:

Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.

Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.

Links on first-year student retention research

A $100,000 Lumina Foundation grant-funded study at Ball State University that attempted to answer the question “How do faculty engage first-year students in the classroom?” Directed by Paul Ranieri, acting English department chair and former director of a residence hall program for freshmen. " Some highlights:

• Ranieri spearheaded a series of summer workshops over three years starting in 2003. Instructors of core curriculum and early major courses applied to participate by identifying specific teaching challenges they wanted to tackle.
  
• ... while the general trend toward higher retention rates and overall grade point averages among students who were in the classes taught by participating faculty is not entirely consistent, the data are “consistent enough through all these different faculty members to raise some questions.”
  
• [While the grant money has been used up, Ranieri said] he hopes to expand a report he’s writing — which tracks retention and GPA data for students who enrolled in the “Lumina” courses as freshmen throughout their college careers — for publication.

Some good stuff on reading in a philosophy course:

David W. Concepción, an associate professor of philosophy, came to the first workshop series in 2003 wondering why “students in courses for some number of years said, ‘I get nothing out of the reading’” (specifically the primary philosophy texts). Discovering through student focus groups that what they meant was that they couldn’t ascertain the main points, Concepción realized that he needed to explain the dialogical nature of philosophy texts to students in his 40-person introductory philosophy course.


Whereas high school texts tend to be linear and students read them with the objective of highlighting facts paragraph by paragraph that they could be tested on, “Primary philosophical texts are dialogical. Which is to say an author will present an idea, present a criticism of that idea, rebut the criticism to support the idea, maybe consider a rejoinder to the rebuttal of the criticism, and then show why the rejoinder doesn’t work and then get on to the second point,” Concepción says.

“If you are reading philosophy and you’re assuming it’s linear and you’re looking for facts, you’re going to be horribly, horribly frustrated.”

So he worked with reading instruction:

Based on the constructivist theory of learning suggesting that students make sense of new information by joining it with information they already have, his guidelines suggest that students begin with a quick pre-read, in which they underline words they don’t know but don’t stop reading until they reach the end. They then would follow up with a more careful read in which they look up definitions, write notes summarizing an author’s argument into their own words on a separate piece of paper, and make notations in the margins such that if they were to return to the reading one week later they could figure out in 15 seconds what the text says (a process Concepción calls “flagging).

Concepción also designed a series of assignments in which his introductory students are trained in the method of reading philosophy texts. They are asked to summarize and evaluate a paragraph-long argument before and after learning the guidelines (and then write a report about their different approaches to the exercise before and after getting the “how-to” document on reading philosophy), turn in a photocopy of an article with their notations, and summarize that same article in writing. They participate in a class discussion in which they present the top five most important things about reading philosophy and face short-answer questions on the midterm about reading strategies (after that, Concepción says, students are expected to apply the knowledge they’ve learned on their own, without further direct evaluation).

Very similar to the tip sheet "Six Reading Myths" from Syracuse that I have linked to my faculty page. My classroom assessments have suggested weak reading skills across the board in all my students, even though our sophomores test at national averages on normed ACT Inc. reading tests. This has been consistent in freshman English, sophomore lit, introductory mass communications and junior- and senior-level news-editorial classes.

Carnegie Mellon has good advice for teaching first-year students on its website for TAs, including a a checklist for covering course objectivesin daily lesson plans. Included are these that relate to reading, or more properly provide students with a context for their reading:

• Prioritize 2-3 main points that you want students to leave the room remembering.
  If you try to cover much more, the key points can get lost in a flood of details.
  
  
• In prioritizing, be sure that you can explain why learning each main topic is important.
  When you can identify up front why students should learn about a topic, students are often better able to follow the goals, structure, and flow of the class.
  
  
• Plan classes to complement the textbook, not replace it.
  It is useful to check with colleagues in your discipline to see how they connect readings with in-class learning.

More on 9-11 coverage

David Usborne is the New York correspondent for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He was in lower Manhattan Sept. 11, 2001, and he knew immediately his coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers would be the story of his life. Reading it now, several years later, it brings back the immediacy he tried to convey to readers in England.

At the end of 2001, he wrote an account of how he covered the story and how he felt that day that is, to my mind, one of the best pieces of reporting to come out of that tragedy. He also captured the conflicting emotions and instincts of a reporter covering a very big story in a way that I think any hard news reporter will recognize.

I cannot really describe how I felt then. Everything else – deadlines, cellphones, whatever – drained from my mind. I felt nausea. I suddenly felt terribly frightened. And profoundly shocked. Death is disturbing always, but there are places when perhaps you expect it. A hospital or a battlefield. Foreign correspondents may see it more than most. But this was a beautiful morning in September – in Manhattan. I was correspondent in New York, for heaven's sake, not Jerusalem or Rwanda. Or Belfast. Those jumpers are still with me. Until recently, I could not talk about them without fighting back the need to cry.

The rest of his account relives that day, from the time he rushed to lower Manhattan in the morning to his trying -- unsuccessfully -- to unwind in an East [Greenwich] Village bar shortly before midnight.

Also linked below are:

• Usborne's spot news coverage on Sept. 12, 2001.
  
• A story Sept. 18, 2001, by David Lister, also of The Independent, on spot news coverage of the attacks by news media in general.

Read all three stories, and answer the following questions:

1. How do Usborne's accounts of the terrorism that morning in New York City stack up as pieces of writing? Compare and contrast his deadline story that ran Sept. 12 with his year's-end retrospective Dec. 28. What's the same? What's different? What does it tell you about deadline writing?

3. What do you learn from reading Usborne about the ethics and instincts of a journalist? Your careers, hopefully, will involve events that much less dramatic. But there may be some of it you can apply to your own writing. What does Usborne say that you can so apply?

COMM 337: Third analytical paper, due Nov. 9

For your next analytical paper, I want you to read the New Orleans Times-Picayune's prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I can't give you a direct link to the stories, but here's the path.

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "BREAKING NEWS REPORTING." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award:

For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news, presented in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to the Staff of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its courageous and aggressive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper.

Click on the little gray tab that says "Works." It's second from the left. That will take you to a directory of the stories submitted in this catagory. The top one has a head in all-caps that says "CATASTROPIC." The rest are from the period August 30-September 3. Read them.

Choose one or two, and analyze them like you did the columns by Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times and the coverage of 9-11 by staff of The Wall Street Journal. Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" in our textbook (pages 152-55), and analyze the stor(ies) you choose for their mastery of the story-teller's art.

See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. Quote them. Quote freely. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze. Due in class Friday, Nov. 9.

COMM 337: In class exercise for Oct. 29

Television producer David Simon, the subject of Margaret Talbot's profile of his TV show in The New Yorker, was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun before he left the newspaper business and went to the HBO show "The Wire." What specific attitudes and instincts of a reporter has he taken with him into TV?

[Here's an example, Simon complains about "the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line." That's typical of reporters, who tend to see the effects of cost-cutting by management, i.e. the "bean counters," as taking away the resources reporters need to do their job right, making them "do less with less." You will find plenty of others as Simon and other newspaper people quoted in Talbot's article talk about their philosophies of life, their ways of getting information out of people, the way they listen to people, their attitudes toward the truth and a wide variety of other matters, large and small.]

In class today: Skim-read back through Talbot's article "Stealing Life," and find three or four passages containing good examples of a reporter's way of thinking on the part of Simon or his former Baltimore Sun colleagues who are working on the show. On the blog you're keeping for COMM 337, (1) quote the passage, (2) explain what you learn from it about reporting and (3) analyze how it can help you in your career as a professional writer and editor.

Since it's on your personal blog, don't be afraid to use your own voice. A couple or three of you are establishing a distinctive way of writing on your blogs that I think you'll be able to include in your portfolios. And most of the rest of you are showing raw talent, and I think everybody who's bothering to post will be able to develop it into the kind of thing you'll be able to show editors and personnel office people before long.

COMM 337: Journaling on Steve Lopez / IN CLASS / REQUIRED

Blog the following and be ready to discuss in class --

Did you ever wonder why news people always call the stuff they write a "story?" Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times has a gift for narrative, for story, and his stories are always based on good reporting. Always.

Let's see how it works. Lopez has been assigned to write color sidebars about the fires in Southern California. (What are color sidebars?) The assignment is a natural for him, since he writes the "Points West" column for The Times and is considered a newsman's newsman ... a guy who knows how to tell a story. In the paper's directory of Lopez' recent columns he has not only stuff about the fires but also a wide variety of stories about people. To one degree or another, they're all based on narrative. Let's find out how he does it.

On your blog, I want you to choose on of his stories and analyze it for narrative technique -- which is just a fancy word for story-telling, right? Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" (pages 152-55), choose one of Lopez' stories in the LA Times and analyze it for his mastery of the story-teller's art.

For example, if I were writing up the story we looked at Wednesday, the one where he interviewed former San Diego fire chief Jeff Bowman about the brush fires, I would focus on the dialog and description. I would notice his use of first person (no matter what they did to the capital "I" on the typewriters at Murray's old paper in Boston)! How many other narrative techniques do you see in this brief quote?

About 8 a.m., Bowman gets a call from his mother's nursing home.

They're evacuating the residents.

"I'll go get her," he tells Denise, and we pile into his truck for a short ride to a nearby neighborhood called Hidden Meadows.

This, I think is pure storytelling, pure narrative. The first person puts us on the scene. There's dialog. The present tense lends immediacy. So do the very short paragraphs. There are bits like that all the way through the story. What other narrative techniques does Lopez rely on? There's a list in Murray.

Your assignment: Pick another story. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find in the story. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze.

COMM 337: Feature story link, Oct. 29 assignment

Your next 1,000-plus word analysis of a feature story is due a week from Monday, in class on Oct. 29. It's on an article in this week's New Yorker by Margaret Talbot. It's titled "Stealing Life," and it's a profile of television producer David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who now writes and produces the HBO show "The Wire." It's available on line. Hurry up and print it out, because The New Yorker may not archive the story on its website much longer. I also have a print copy of the magazine if you need to photocopy it.

Either way, you should get started reading it now. It's long. I haven't counted words, but 6,000 words is a pretty standard length for magazine features. And I'd say it's at least that. It takes up 12 pages in the magazine.

But it's an excellent story. Talbot is a New Yorker staff writer and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. She's written for quality publications like Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Her writing, at least this story, is solidly based on in-depth reporting.

What to look for ... and what I'll be looking for in your papers:

• Simon's experience at The Baltimore Sun gives him an inside perspective on the newspaper business. What does he say about the past, present and future of newspapering? How is his world view shaped by having been a reporter? How does that experience affect the way he goes about writing the show? What do you learn about the craft of newspapering from Simon?
  
• This year's story line will be about a fictional newspaper that is based on the Sun and even uses its name. Several of the people working with him on this year's "Wire" show are ex-colleagues at the Sun. How do their backgrounds in newspapering shape their world views? What do they say about journalistic standards? How do their professional standards, values and instincts affect the show? What do you learn about journalism in 21st-century America from reading about Simon and his colleagues?
  
• How good a reporter is Talbot? How does she manage to reflect in her writing the subtle flavor of speech in the Jewish community (look for phrases like "keeping kosher" for following Jewish dietary laws), and in people from Baltimore and New Orleans? Cops? Politicians? Street hustlers? Musicians? (Notice, too: They're all interested in language, in listening to people, really listening, so they can get just the right word.) How much of Talbot's story is based on interviews, and how much on direct observation? What does she hear and what does she see that lends versimilitude to the story? What do you learn about the craft of reporting and writing from reading her story?

Week in and week out, some of the best reporting in America appears in the New Yorker. (I'm afraid Simon and his co-workers are right when they say you don't see much of it in newspapers any more.) And Talbot's is one of the better stories I've seen there lately.

Here's an insight I especially liked:

After years of reporting in Baltimore’s ghettos, [Simon] found himself at ease with being the only white person in a room, or the only person in the room who didn’t know how to re-vial drugs, and found, too, that he could channel the voices of people in the game. “To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me,” Simon explained. “I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

A warning, though: It helps you keep it covered if you can find it with both hands. Don't ask how I know that.

Another insight. It's gloomy, but unfortunately it rings true. Talbot says:

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

Fortunately, reporters like Talbot and magazines like The New Yorker are.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

Assessment: High-stakes test quote of the day

From The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London, the quote of the day -- perhaps the quote of the year -- on high-stakes testing. It comes in a story about new secondary school testing standards announced by the Labour government, raising mandated proficiency levels on the GCSE tests taken by 11-year-olds nationwide. Said Jovan Trkulga, a supply (substitute) teacher at Deptford Green primary in Lewisham, south London:

"High-stakes testing has got to a ridiculous state... it is making children unhappy. Telling teachers they have to improve their children's performance is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs."

British GCSE tests measure students' mastery of the national General Certificate of Secondary Education curriculum. The government, which is more directly involved in curriculum than the U.S. government, today announced tighter new standards in math and English:

The new targets will mean ministers expect 53 per cent off youngsters to obtain five A* to C grade passes at GCSE – including maths and English – by the end of the decade. At present, only 45 per cent do – although this figure has risen from 35 per cent in 1997.

In addition, ministers have repeated their target of getting 85 per cent of youngsters to reach the required standard in national curriculum test for 11-year-olds by the end of the decade. Previously, this target had been set for 2006 but it would need a five percentage point rise in English and nine percentage point rise in maths to achieve the target.

Sounds a little bit like No Child Left Behind in the U.S., doesn't it? So does the reaction:

Teachers' leaders breathed a sigh of relief after it emerged ministers planned a bigger increase in education spending than had previously been forecast. However, they warned that the targets could lead to more "teaching to the tests", with the danger that more pupils could be put off learning.

COMM 337: Robert Fisk interviews Osama bin Laden

On Wednesday I'll have an assignment sheet for your first analytical paper, on a piece of public affairs reporting by British correspondent Robert Fisk. In the meantime, here's a link to the piece I want you to read ... it's a chapter from his book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. In it he tells about the three times he has interviewed Osama bin Laden.

(The "s" in the title is CQ. Fisk is British, and he uses British spellings.)

Fisk writes for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He has lived in the Middle East since the 1980s, and he is a fierce critic of U.S. and British foreign policy in the region. He is no less critical of Israel, and he has been accused of anti-Semitism. I don't think those charges have been proven, at least not by my definition of anti-Semitism, but you should be aware of the controversy over his writing.

In a perceptive review of The Great War in The New York Times, English author Geoffrey Wheatcroft says Fisk "is one of the most controversial journalists of the age, winner of numerous prizes, much admired by some, including colleagues who respect his obsessive attention to detail and sheer physical courage, execrated by others because of what has been seen as his open hostility to Israel, America and the West." Wheatcroft says the book is much too long, and Fisk's "ungovernable anger may do his heart credit, but it does not make for satisfactory history." But when Fisk sticks to straight reporting, Wheatcroft says, The Great War is "a stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic, who has known the region better than most and has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi (who offered to introduce him to Oliver North)." Fisk has reported, quite literally, on one war after the other since he was first posted to the Middle East in 1982.

"This is really several books fighting each other inside the sack," says Wheatcroft.

Another reviewer, a former British ambassador Libya, Luxembourg and Greece named Oliver Miles, agrees Fisk's book is "excessively long ... a real War and Peace, but with precious little peace." (We're reading about 25 pages out of 1,283.) In his review in The Guardian (U.K.), Miles says, "Vigilant editing and ruthless pruning could perhaps have made two or three good short books out of this one." But when Fisk isn't venting his opinion, his reporting is masterful. Says Miles, "His forte is straight reporting, such as his three interviews with Osama bin Laden."

COMM 337, 393, 207, 150: News or Fark?

Cross-posted from my Mackerel Wrapper blog, with some comments about the midterm in Communications 150 deleted.

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggragator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150, 207, 337, etc.: Where the jobs are

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's characterized by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.

COMM 337: Objective bio of Seymour Hersh

I had to wade through a lot of biased writing to find it, but I finally located a fairly objective profile of Seymour Hersh, writer for The New Yorker who says President Bush wants to bomb Iran (a charge the White House dismisses but doesn't exactly come right out and deny). It's by Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post, and it came out in 2004. It only comes to three pages in printer-friendly format, but it says pretty much the same thing as the 20-page Columbia Journalism Review profile I linked below -- Hersh is controversial and opinionated, but he's a tireless reporter and he usually gets his facts straight.

Kurtz, typically, doesn't offer his own opinion. But he quotes two journalists who can offer an informed opinion on Hersh's work:

"A lot of Washington journalists act like hedge-trimmers or pruning shears," says Time defense correspondent Mark Thompson. "Sy is a noisy, smoke-spewing chain saw -- and a relentless stump-grinder, to boot."

Bill Kovach, who once edited Hersh as the [New York] Times's Washington bureau chief, says that "he's maintained a kind of groundfire of anger at abuses of power unlike any I've ever seen."

And how does Hersh unearth his information? "He's relentless," Kovach says. "He's rapid-fire. He asks two or three questions at a time. He just keeps going and going until he gets where he wants to go. He religiously tracks these sources, he talks to them all the time."

You can read Kurtz' article and come to your own conclusion about Sy Hersh, but for my money Thompson's bit about the chain saw has got to be one of the all-time great quotes.

COMM337: Assignment for Friday

In a press conference Tuesday, President Bush's press secretary declined to comment on reports by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that Bush plans to bomb Iran. Instead, she cast doubt on Hersh's use of anonymous sources in the New Yorker article. His use of sources is a controversial issue, and it involves his reporting and writing techniques; for Friday, I want you to read his article and evaluate how his use of anonymous sources affects his credibility.

By class time Friday, plesase read Hersh's article "Shifting Targets" and answer the following questions:

• How many anonymous sources does Hersh use? Does he describe them in a believeable way? Does he explain why they aren't speaking on the record? Do they seem to have good information? How do they affect his credibility?
  
• Does Hersh's story seem opinionated, or does it sound objective? Does he try to give both sides of debatable issues? Does he back up his claims with evidence? Can you determine from what he writes how careful his reporting was?
  

Please post your answers as comments to this post.

Some necessary background follows:

This week's flap. According to Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post (who is outspokenly critical of Bush), White House Press Secretary Dana Perino dismissed "questions about Hersh's piece from CNN's Ed Henry and CBS's Bill Plante." Froomkin quoted from the White House transcript of Tuesday's press briefing:

Perino: "Look, you know, I'm glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it."

Henry: "So the President --"

Perino: "The President has said that he believes that there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that's why we're working with our allies to get there."

Plante: "That's what he said before we went to Iraq, too."

Henry: "But what's the -- can you answer actually on the substance of whether or not the White House asked -- I mean, if it's not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You could say that, but --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things, Ed."

Henry: " -- what about the substance of whether we --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things. What we have said and what we are working towards is a diplomatic solution in Iran. What the President has also said is that as a President, as a Commander-in-Chief -- and any Commander-in-Chief -- would not take any option off the table. But the option that we are pursuing right now is diplomacy."

Henry: "But the article very specifically said that this summer in a video conference -- secure video conference with Ambassador Crocker, the President said that he was thinking about 'hitting Iran' and also --"

Perino: "I'm not going to comment on -- one, I don't know. I wouldn't have been at any -- at that type of a meeting. I don't know. I'm not going to comment on any possible -- any possible scenario that an anonymous source, you know, continues to feed into Sy Hersh. I'm just not going the do it."

Two things are clear from this exchange. One is the White House is out to discredit Hersh. The other is the White House doesn't care for leaks.

Fromkin suggests a third, that Perino "refused to respond to any of the specific claims Hersh made in this week's New Yorker about White House support for a new path to war with Iran." However, if you read Froomkin very much, he has no use for Bush and he 's strongly opposed to Bush's conduct of the War on Terror.

Controversy over Hersh's reporting. Sy Hersh is no stranger to controversy -- or to the use of anonymous sources -- ever since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for reporting on the My Lai massacre and its coverup in Vietnam. Froomkin says Hersh "has a history of well-sourced, groundbreaking reporting." And that view is common within the profession. But Froomkin is hardly an unbiased observer.

So I'm linking the Wikipedia profile on Hersh. It clearly has been edited by people who have strong opinions about him, both for him and against him, but the nature of Wikipedia is to get into he-said, she-said counterpoint on controversial subjects. I'd read it more for the extremes of opinion, and seek balance elsewhere.

One lengthy, but balanced and detailed profile of Hersh appeared in The Columbia Journalism Review in 2003. It comes to 20 pages printed out (in a printer-friendly format no less!), but it's the best thing I've read on a very controversial and very important reporter.

COMM 337: Read this, you @#$%!

As we read good writers -- other good writers (see yesterday's blog below) -- to improve our own writing, we not only read them, but read them for style ... read them analytically, asking ourselves questions like, "How did they do that? And how can I do it better?" Here, to get us started, is a column by Mark Morford on the SFGate.com website. He comes out twice a week in the print edition of The San Francisco Chronicle, but he's primarily an online writer. "His writing," according to Wikipedia, which hits the nail on the head this time, "is sometimes controversial and almost always non-journalistic in style, attitude and tone." How can it be non-journalistic if it's on a journalists' website?

Read the linked column. It's about fast food ads, and it's headed "Eat This, You Fat, Sad Idiot." Ask yourself the following questions: (1) Is he insulting his readers, or giving them a sly pat on the back? (2) What things about Morford's style of writing appeal to you, and what things turn you off? (3) How well suited would you guess his style is for readers in San Francisco? For online readers irrespective of location? (4) How would Morford's column fly in a conservative, Midwestern town like Springfield? With older readers? With people in your demographic? Could it be toned down without losing its appeal? We'll discuss them in class, and you'll write an analysis for your blog. Link to the column, and post your thoughts between now and Monday. (That way you'll have the weekend to catch up.)

Morford, according to Wikipedia, has taught Vinyasa yoga classes and is a two-time winner in the online segment of the annual contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

COMM 337: Ledes, in-class exercise

One good way we can improve our writing is to read other good writers. (Notice I said "other good writers," so you'll have that to live up to?) Today's assignment is in that spirit.

After reviewing Don Murray's discussion "Qualities of an Effective Lead" (Writing to Deadline 93), find a story with an effective lede on a newspaper website, post a link to it and analyze what makes it effective -- post the link and a paragraph of analysis as a comment on this message.

(Notice something else? I'm setting up this assignment so you'll have an opportunity to review what Murray says about effective ledes. Clever, huh?)

Be ready to talk in class about your story, too. We'll take a look at some of the stories you found and how we can use the techniques their writers used.

You should remember how to post a link, but here's a reminder:

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

1. In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
   
2. Go to the comment field. Type in <a href="
   
3. Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
   
4. Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
   
5. Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example Link here
   
6. Immediately after those words, type </a>
   
7. Your link should look this this <a href="address">Link here</a>

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. --sportswriting

Cross-posted to all my journalism blogs. -- pe

I surfed into this column by ESPN Page 2 sportwriter Scoop Jackson while I was "reading the paper(s)" on the Web this morning. It was linked to Jim Romenesko's blog on newspapering. I don't follow sports very closely (other than Illinois Statehouse politics). So I'm not familiar with Jackson. But this time he was writing about a meeting he had with high school journalism students in Kansas, and he headlined it, "A Fresh Perspective on Sportwriting." I think some of you will enjoy it.

Jackson says the kids had been studying his writing, and they came at him with a depth of knowledge and interest:

They came with it. Straight -- no chaser, no ice, no water back. They didn't ask about how this person was or what type of person that person was. What's Shaq like in person? Have you ever met Tom Brady? Is AI as cool as he seems? Who do you think is going to win the World Series? Is Derek Jeter really that cute in real life? None of that. They didn't come with the standard, star-obsessed questions that sportswriters usually get when we walk into a school full of young girls cute like Kaley Cuoco and young guys smooth like Shia LaBeouf.

Instead, they asked about the writing. The art of storytelling and meeting deadlines. Angles and ideas. They asked about the seriousness of what it is that we sportswriters do and how we approach our craft differently every day, so that we can continue to generate interest. They came authentic.

And Jackson came back at them with candid answers. I liked the way he said, "that sports journalism, just like sports itself, is a business first -- that the writer's goal is to provide meaningful content and the job of the company that employs us is to make money." My sport was politics, and that's how it was back in my newspapering days -- I was working for a business, and my job was to make the politics meaningful for my readers.

And I liked what Jackson said about writing. Like this:

... I told them -- as I had once written -- that nothing I write will ever be considered for "The Best American Sports Writing" because of how I write, but that should never be a writer's goal: "Learn to enjoy the process of writing and the end results will take care of themselves." My mouth to their ears.

I told them that as writers, we should believe in the craft first, self second. In that order. Always.

He recommended the kids read widely, "that expanding their reading base beyond sports will make them better writers because -- as much as we'd like to think it is -- life is not all about sports." He even suggested a reading list, which I'll let you read in his column.

And I especially liked what Jackson said about editing, and being edited. One thing you get used to when you're a professional writer is having editors change your copy. And one thing you have to learn is the humility to realize when they've made it better. So I liked this bit:

Before I left Blue Valley Northwest in Overland Park, Kansas, Matt (one of the two students who sent me the e-mail that initiated this whole thing), still with the smile on his face that appeared the second I walked from backstage to surprise him at 8:30 a.m., said something to me.

"Scoop, you know the [New England Patriots and coach Bill] Belichick piece you just did? The one titled '22 Questions?' Well, I read it a few times and you actually have 25 questions in the story not 22."

"No sirrr," I said back. "I made sure there were 22 questions in that piece. Trust me, there's exactly 22."

"Sorry," he said while handing me a copy of the story he had marked up, as if he were already an ESPN editor. "There's 25, Mr. Jackson. I counted."

Which I knew he did. He was thorough like that. I knew he was right because I now knew that's who he is. That he didn't want to test me or check me, just make sure that in his eyes and in the eyes of every other student in the school I remained the best writer I could possibly be, that I remained his inspiration -- which is why his teacher knew I should meet him in the first place, why she wanted me to meet all of them.