An interview isn't a substitute for being there

Today's feature on Joshua Landis was good, but it lacked depth.

It lacked depth because the only thing I know about Landis' experience is what he told the reporter. I'm sure Landis is accurate and honest about his experiences, but the second hand nature of an interview doesn't help readers understand the situation he is in as one of the leading experts on Syria. It only explains it to them.

Actually, a lot of our features on faculty, staff and students tend to lack one of the most important things journalists can leverage: our powers of observation.

Instead of telling me through an interview with Landis how he "whores around" (a good quote) with the media, take some time to go with Landis to an interview he has to do. Try to spend extra time with him to observe his reactions to media phone calls. Does his demeanor change? Does he take a more authoritative tone? Perhaps he loses/maintains his jovial personality?

These are important things to add to features. A good feature is usually about something someone does. But a great feature is about something someone does and how that action impacts them and their loved ones.

Taking some extra time and asking the main source of the feature if you can shadow them to observe their experiences will go a LONG way in helping you write a story. No longer is the story about struggling to find transitions between quotes. (If you find yourself doing that then you aren't writing a feature. It's a question and answer story.) Now it has observation. Now you SHOW readers how the decisions and actions and personality of a person impacts themselves and others.

Here are some great features I've read that I think help expand our idea of a feature. They are long, but they are long because the reporter took the time to observe as well as interview them. These are professional, magazine features, but they provide an excellent foundation in approaching interesting subjects (in this case it's famous people or athletes).

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Gay Talese (This is one of my favorite things...ever)

The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson - Tom Wolfe

An excellent example of a great newspaper feature was written by our very own Chris Miller. Miller braved the cold at 5 a.m. to discover just what the work of a Facilities Management employee LOOKED like during a pending ice storm. It's great stuff.

Crews work overnight to clear snow -- Chris Miller

Take a look at these examples and apply the wonderful and powerful tool of observation to make your features more compelling. Your readers will thank you.

Always transparent, even in the face of Armageddon

Wednesday's page one story about Health Department inspections at Campus Restaurants was awesome. Carmen Forman did an excellent job reporting a sensitive topic. Great job.

However, there was some phrasing in the story that is a good opportunity to teach a lesson.

The story talks about "serious violations" multiple times. The problem isn't the word "violation" because it's a noun and it is factually accurate to call it a violation.

But the word "serious" brings up a new issue. "Serious" is an adjective and adjectives can be dangerous.

As a reader, I could be asking myself "who says these violations are serious"? Is it the reporter? Is it the document? Who says and why should I care? Without dictating where the word "serious" is coming from could jeopardize the message you are trying send.

So how do we fix this when a document or organization dictates something is serious? The best way to get around this if you can't write around the word "serious" (or explain how the tiered penalty system works) is to use quotations marks around the word. Putting quotes around the word tells the reader this information is coming directly from a source (a person or a document).

The argument could be made that without the quotation marks the word "serious" is still factually accurate. I agree. But putting the quotations around the word is more transparent and creates a more honest relationship between the sources, the journalist, the reader and the story.

According to whom?

While editing stories this past week, I've noticed a new trend.

Some writers have a habit of attributing paraphrases and quotes like this:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, Chase Cook, managing editor of The Daily, said.

This is not the right way to do this. You don't want to separate the noun from the participle "said."

Instead, make sure you are attributing quotes this way:

blah blah blah blah blah, said Chase Cook, managing editor of The Daily.

This way the appositive portion of the sentence finds a comfortable spot after the noun and the participle "said" and the noun are together.

In other situations, you may be writing about someone that doesn't have a long title. The normal rule is titles of two words or less go in front of the name, like so:

blah blah blah blah blah, managing editor Chase Cook said.


Attributing quotes to people is easy, but because it is so easy the rules can be often forgotten. Make sure you go through your stories and double check that your attribution is following these rules.

Compare the right facts

As journalists, we have a tendency to collect a lot of data in the search for truth. Inevitability, we have to compare that information together. It helps us create context and it helps us determine impact.

However, when we compare sets of data, sometimes we might compare the wrong information.

This happened today and the impact of that mistake means that some of our readers are now armed with misinformation.

Our newspaper asserted that Crossroads' grilled chicken has 805.9 calories and 10.45 grams of fat. We then compared that to grilled chicken cooked at home, which magically had 100 calories and one-half gram of fat.

That's very confusing. So I did a little research and looked up the sources we attributed to this information.

I found out that the Crossroads' grilled chicken that was referenced in the article is actually a chicken sandwich with a lot of ingredients and sauces. The grilled chicken cooked at home was a 3 oz serving of Tyson grilled chicken strips. (The article mentions this, but it doesn't mention the fact the "other" grilled chicken is a sandwich.)

This happened with the grilled cheese comparison in the article too, but not as severely. Grilled cheese is pretty simple, but the article asserts that two slices of bread and some cheese should be the same no matter what. Not necessarily. What if the bread used by the homeowner or restaurant is thicker or thinner? It is entirely possible for me to go home and make a grilled cheese sandwich that is worse for me than the restaurant version. Why? Because there is no data provided about the type of bread used and the amount of cheese.

Because we weren't upfront with our information or careful when comparing sets of data, we now have misinformed readers. They may actually think a piece of grilled chicken from Crossroads' is filled with fat and calories, but that isn't entirely true. It's the sandwich, not the chicken.

We have a responsibility to our readers to make sure we get information accurate. The next time you sit down and start comparing things, make sure it makes sense to compare them. Make sure you are telling the whole story and being transparent with the data that you do have. Our readers will appreciate it, and they will be better informed because of your efforts.

JAKE MORGAN WINS THE (TUES)DAY


Tuesday's story about cadavers was awesome. Jake Morgan did pretty much everything right in the story. It was interesting, it was about students and it was well written. GREAT JOB!

And to top it off, Ben Williams photo illustration turned out much better than anticipated. Excellent work.

Beat reporting tips

For new journalists, the concept of covering a beat may seem foreign. At first reference, it may seem to be just another piece of jargon slung around to make the more experienced reporters and editors seem cool or in the know.

Not true.

A beat is a specific area of campus given to reporters to cover. It's that reporter's (or team of reporters') job to find out what is happening on that beat and write stories related to those findings.

Where do you start?

I'm glad you asked! I've thought about printing a handout to give out to all of the reporters, but I'm pretty sure almost all of those get thrown away (or hopefully recycled). I'm not going to do that. This blog post will layout some tips and tricks of good beat reporting, which all of you lovely staff members can use as a reference.

Let's get started.

Know who the players are -- One of the most important things you can do on a beat is found out who the players are (leaders, workers, administrators, secretaries) and any other people involved in the department. Find them, meet them and tell them who you are. Don't wait until you have a story to talk to them. Get to know them a little bit. They will provide great insight into your beat and will be valuable resources when generating story ideas.

Research websites -- One of the most important things beat reporters can do before heading out to a story, or while trying to find a story, is to scour the websites of the beat they are covering. If it tougher for some of the other beats, but most of the time a reporter will have a website they can reliably use to gather information. Most of the time, this will be used to gather background information, sources and documents will provide the good stuff.

Know your topic -- Working on the financial aid beat? Read about scholarships, loans and grants. Writing about crime? Read other crime stories and learn how other newspapers cover the issue (a lot of time, it isn't good, but sometimes you see a great trend story). Writing about academics? Read The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Actually, everyone should be reading The Chronicle of Higher Education. It is a great resource to learn statistics about university and what other reporters are writing about on a national scale. We got linked there one time. It was pretty awesome.

Talk to students -- This should be obvious. We write for the students. They are our audience and our content MUST matter to them. If we don't know what they are talking about or what matters to them, how can we know how issues are affecting them? This doesn't mean you need to talk with students with your notepad out all the time. Sometimes, when you are in line or at lunch or just doing your normal day-to-day thing, talk to people!!! You don't even have to tell them you are a journalist at first (once the conversation moves into an interview for the story, make sure they know who you are and where you work, or course). 

I don't have the time or energy to list a lot of the other things that make great beat reporters, so I will link them below. What I want everyone to understand (and this goes for every beat on every desk) is that you can't find stories by staying holed up in your office or home. Yes, we can use tools in our office and home to find information, but we won't really know what is happening in our community if we don't get outside and talk to people.

Beat Reporting: What Does it Take To Be the Best

This link is a great tool to understand some of the other tangible and intangible skills beat reporters need. Use it to your advantage.

It may seem this may have a focus on the campus desk (I am a hard-news guy), but these tips can be applied to every desk.

Please, if any of you have questions, don't hesitate to come to my desk or call or email me. I am MORE than happy to discuss any aspect of reporting with you guys.

Happy reporting!

Misery loves misspellings

Alright. Two days in a row of easily avoidable spelling mistakes.

Let's get this together editors.

A quick rundown of misspellings Friday and Monday:

• Too was spelled two
• Fayetteville, Ark. was spelled Fayateville, Ark.
• half was spelled haf
• discrimination was spelled descrimination
• Center's was spelled centter's
• samples was spelled smaples

This is unacceptable. Every person submitting or editing content needs to be spell checking. It isn't hard, and it doesn't take up much time. On these Apples computers, it's a quick Apple +I. These are easy mistakes that make the paper look unprofessional and uncredible.

We must avoid them. So please make sure you are spell checking EVERY piece of content you submit, edit and place in the paper.

MEETING DEADLINES


A lot of the desks are improving their response to deadlines. Reporters are turning in stories in a timely manner. This makes for an easy production night for the unsung heroes working the copy edit and night worker trenches. Even more amazing, the Campus editors went home at 7 p.m., which is one time! Great job to everyone that is making their deadlines.

Keep it up, the editors notice this and appreciate when everyone comes through.

Don't be a megaphone

Thursday's story about the new Chuy's restaurant was well written and, for lack of a better term, interesting.

It's tough to write about new things opening because, when it comes to news, the only thing really worth reporting is what it is, what they sell and when it will open. So, are stories like this really worth a full story? When we are generating story ideas (on any desk) this is something we need to take into consideration before committing ourselves to writing something.

Why?

Well, what is the impact of this Chuy's story? Is it informative? Sure. It has good quotes from students and even the marketing assistant (code word for business cheerleader). So, Mark Simpson did a good job. But, I think there is more that could have been considered here, and if that information wasn't available, I would have cut this story in half. In fact, I would have made this a brief.

Look at the 7 graph of this story (I'm using the online version). Once this graph begins, every other graph is a quote and almost every graph before the quote is a paraphrase of a conversation. This means you (the reporter) are being a mouthpiece. We have to let the sources give us the information for the story, but we must avoid letting them do all the talking. If we let the source do all the talking, we are nothing more than a glorified megaphone.

That's not what we are about.

Granted, at The Oklahoma Daily, we tell all of you to attribute everything. That's a good starting point. As you are learning to write, I would rather you tell me where you got everything. But, as we move forward, we can start becoming mini-experts on subjects and providing generally accepted facts without attributing them to websites or press releases. Sometimes we can even provide some sense to particular situations once we are comfortable in our role as mini-expert (read seasoned journalists' work, they have a tendency to explain issues while providing information from sources).

Our role as journalists in this post-gatekeeping world is to process and make sense of information we gather. Not necessarily to repeat it. A quote's job is to add emotion (see: human element) to a story. It isn't a vessel to bolster your word count. Using them effectively enhances the story, but too many will bog down a story.

OH. Don't run to city politicians for quotes unless it's absolutely necessary. Sure, interview them and see if they provide you with any information, but don't be prepared to use their quotes. Politicians at ANY level are going to lie to you. Plan and simple. They are rarely programmed for truth.

PRAISE!

The online desk has done a great job tweeting/Facebooking stories, coding infoboxes and being advocates for a stronger website. Great job Juan Sanchez and Katherine Borgerding.

Ana Lastra and her video crew (which I'm pretty sure is still one other guy) have done a great job producing content on an almost daily basis. The content is varied and well edited. I'm routinely impressed. Great job.

Janna Gentry and Zachary Carrel wrote a nice point/counterpoint on Joe Paterno's legacy. Both editorials navigated a complex issue with thoughtful debate. Is there a decision so wrong that it could eradicate everything we have ever worked for? There may be no "real truth" to that question, but this editorial combo positively contributes to the discussion.

The photo desk has done an awesome job at turning photos around last minutes, making an effort to plan ahead when possible and taking some good photos. It was a rocky start, but there has been a marked improvement. If all the desks can improve communication when planning stories, the photos are only going to get better. Special shout out to Astrud Reed for some AWESOME men's basketball photos. Great stuff.

Keep up the great work, everyone.