The very nature of the job entails going to people who have the answers ( be it the expert, the person in the know, etc.) and asking that person to fill us in. Simple enough, right? But every semester, I see students who can’t get a handle on this idea.

For these students — who have spent 12+ years being drilled into a fear of not having the answers — they struggle to come to grips with admitting they don’t have the answers — to, well, look stupid. And so many student journalists who struggle are simply unwilling to go to the lengths needed in an interview to get the information for their articles because of this inability to realize why they are interviewing in the first place.

After all, conducting interviews is an acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers. The simple fact that if we had all the answers, we wouldn’t need to do interviews. Yet, student journalists often balk at the idea of being vulnerable enough to admit this essential fact of journalism: I don’t know. And since they can’t admit they don’t know, they can’t move to the real work of journalism: finding out.

For more news and views on the future of journalism, follow @szuminsky.

David Cruz recently covered this most unpleasant of reporter’s roles (and the one all news directors and editors insist on). The post (which you can read in full here) is worth your time, but an important point stuck out about avoiding the “cardinal sin” of getting your facts wrong:

What I always do when calling back is I tell them with great sincerity is, “I don’t want to mess your loved ones memory so do you mind if I go over some facts with you again?”  Mourners are usually agreeable and pretty impressed by your sensitivity to their personal tragedy.  In the end, they’re willing to work with you if you write a story that preserves their memory.

Having someone who just experienced tragedy speak with you requires they trust you to not mishandle their loved one’s memory. You need to respect that trust.

For more news and views on the future of journalism, follow @szuminsky.

The whole list is worth a read, but what stood out to me was this advice:

1. Lose the jack of all trades. Go deep with one tech skill

A lot of students are coming out of universities prepared to do several things moderately well, Pilhofer said. “It’s both fortunate and unfortunate – it’s unfortunate because you aren’t seeing specialists… the ‘jack of all trades’ approach has a limiting factor built into it.”Instead of encouraging students to learn a little bit of everything, he advised that it is better to be extremely well versed and develop technical skills in one particular area, whether it’s audio, video, web design, etc.

So many times, young journos are told they have to master everything — social media, programming, blogging, SEO, etc. — it’s refreshing to see the perspective that specialization is a trait to strive for. It’s something I envision more and more news orgs will be doing as well, as niche targeting becomes not just the norm but a necessity for survival.

For more news and views on the future of journalism, follow @szuminsky.

If you’ve ever tried to impress upon a student that they actually need to, you know, do something, this is the post for you. At Waynesburg, we stress and stress the importance of co-curricular activities (the student newspaper, radio station, television productions, etc.) as a way of building a resume full of actual accomplishments, rather than the flotsam and jetsam The Onion piece so deliciously skewers:

“I don’t know how this is possible, but it says he has experience in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on both PC and Mac,” said sales developer Brenda Juarez, explaining that she had to do a double take after reading the line in Wilhelm’s cover letter explaining that he had “both professional and personal experience on multiple social media platforms.” “And on top of it all, he’s taken the classes Introduction to Communication, Writing for Mass Media, and Interpersonal Communication. I mean, this guy’s on a different plane altogether.”

It would be a lot funnier if it didn’t show up — nearly verbatim — on so many resumes.

For more news and views on the future of journalism, follow @szuminsky.

You have to remove your ass from your chair, leave the newsroom and go out into the world to discover the news. News is greater than what you see in your line of sight from your comfy chair or when looking out your dorm window. It is more than what you are hand fed via email. 

News is about a natural curiosity. It is about being among the people and *gasp* talking to them. That’s right, the rules have changed. Now that you’re in college, I want you to talk to strangers — on purpose. 

It’s a lesson that I think is increasingly important as students reared on the Web expect everything to come to them from some sort of screen. I’m no Luddite, but this is one instance we’re I’ll go on a “damn kids today” rant about them not looking up from their phones or laptops.

J-Educators, what are some ways you’re getting your students out of their chairs and out into the wide, scary world?

For more news and views on the future of journalism, follow @szuminsky.

It's been a great run but all good things must come to a end. Thank you Steelers Nation I will miss you all!—
James Harrison (@jharrison9292) March 09, 2013

Not from the Post-Gazette. Not from the Tribune-Review. Not from WPXI, KDKA, or WTAE. In a town with five local media outlets, the news of one of the most popular players on the team leaving came from none other than the player himself.

Welcome to the world of covering sports today.

This is not a new development, of course. James Harrison isn’t the first player to head to his Twitter feed rather than calling up the local beat reporter. Rather, the Harrison example is just another reminder that increasingly, news organizations are finding themselves competing not with each other, but with those whom used to be sources.

Writing in the Washington Post, Paul Farhi pointed to the challenge of teams themselves circumventing the local media:

For sports journalists these days, the playing field isn’t always level. As the Iowa incident suggests, teams and leagues can break their own news, over and around the independent news media that cover them. Professional and big-time college teams aren’t just news sources now; they’re in the news business, too, with their own radio, TV and Internet operations. …
In an earlier age, teams welcomed coverage as free publicity. Now, in an age when technology permits almost anyone to broadcast text, photos and videos instantly, some are far more wary of reporters, viewing them as info-competitors.

But as Harrison demonstrated, it’s not just the teams that news orgs have to worry about. And this can have major ramifications for a symbiotic business model that has existed for generations, according to Jason Fry at Poynter:

All of these developments point to another buzzword from the Web’s early days: disintermediation, or eliminating the middleman. When teams are publishers, and athletes can speak directly to fans, the cost-benefit analysis of opening locker rooms to journalists changes. Like all middlemen in the digital world, they’re endangered.

Maybe this won’t matter. The last decade has seen an explosion in sports news, analysis and chatter, and dedicated fans continue to devour as much as they can get. But at the very least, sports journalists will face powerful new competitors with unbeatable access.

And, in case you weren’t already feeling sorry for your local sports beat guy, it’s only going to get worse, Fry posits:

Now, throw in athletes who are taking to Twitter to connect directly with fans, and using it to break their own news. Most professional athletes on Twitter are still digital immigrants – they started tweeting after they were famous. But very soon, star rookies will arrive who have used social media throughout their teens. For them, communicating via social media will be far more familiar than confronting a scrum of reporters.

It’s worth noting that Fry doesn’t just sound the alarm, he offers some actual advice to trying to stem the approaching apocolypse:

Rather than risk being caught flat-footed then, sports departments should plan now for the era of teams as publishers and competitors.

First, think about what news teams will hold back to break themselves, and get out of the business of competing with them for it.

Next, discuss which stories are me-too fare that readers can get anywhere, and that waste reporters’ valuable time.

Having done that, think about what niches teams can’t fill. Fortunately, there are lots of these — statistical analysis, investigative reporting, scouting upcoming opponents, minor-league reports and historical perspective, to name just a few. Think about if any of those approaches make sense for your news organization, and brainstorm how middlemen can use their status to add value. (For instance, become a great curator, using news judgment to collect the must-reads for a team’s fans whether things are good, bad or ugly.)

Fry was talking to current reporters, of course, but he also laid out a pretty cut-and-dry game plan for journalism educators to use to revamp how they teach the coverage of sports.

What do you think? Are sports journalists futures more in danger than “run-of-the-mill” reporters? And if so, what does that mean for those just entering (or soon to enter) the field?

Related articles

• James Harrison tweets his goodbye to the Steelers (profootballtalk.nbcsports.com)
• Steelers Release James Harrison (cstrimble.wordpress.com)
• James Harrison’s Greatest Hits (behindthesteelcurtain.com)
• Steelers shed Harrison after LB won’t take pay cut (cbssports.com)
• James Harrison released: Steelers cut one of the best players in franchise history (behindthesteelcurtain.com)
• James Harrison released: Will the 49ers take a look? (ninersnation.com)

Aaron Swartz at a Boston Wiki Meetup (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The story of Adam Swartz — his promise, his ideology, his prosecution/persecution and his suicide — has many compelling angles. Davin Wilfrid recently wrote about one that has been underexamined by journalists and journalism educators: namely “The journalistic convention of breathlessly reporting the maximum allowable sentence in any criminal prosecution…”

Wilfrid argues that while nobody involved in the case thought ​would realistically go to jail for 35 years or pay the $1 million fine that was oft-reported, the average reader was left with that impression because that’s the only option stories about Swartz’s case presented.

​This bothered me when I was a reporter. Every time I wrote about criminal charges, I was instructed to include the maximum sentence for the charge, since it was the only verifiable fact we had. But why would the conventions of journalism have us assume the reader has only a 9th grade reading level (no big words! no complex sentences!) yet a far more sophisticated understanding of the nature of criminal prosecutions? Because that’s what you would need to understand the difference between “he faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine” and “he faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine, but there will likely be two years of pre-trial motions, plea bargain negotiations, and political posturing before the government finally accepts a guilty plea in exchange for a sentence far less onerous than the maximum allowable.”

Wilfrid offers a few suggestions around this dilemma, including quote legal experts on likely outcomes or an app that would compare similar cases. The case illustrates a powerful lesson for those in journalism or those training the next generation of journalists:

Whatever the solution is, the problem is journalism’s bias toward facts regardless of context.

​The job of journalism is not to report the facts. The job of journalism is to report the truth.

Related articles

• Attorney General Eric Holder defends Aaron Swartz prosecution before Senate committee (boston.com)
• Which Long Magazine Profile of the Aaron Swartz Case Should You Read? (volokh.com)
• Attorney General Claims Aaron Swartz Case Was “A Good Use of Prosecutorial Discretion” (techcrunch.com)
• Eric Holder Says Aaron Swartz’s Prosecutors Did Their Job Properly (3dblogger.typepad.com)
• Aaron Swartz’s grand jury: State-enforced betrayal (salon.com)
• DOJ ‘admits’ to targeting Aaron Swartz over his activism (rt.com)

Will there ever be a secure living in freelancing full-time, in an age when so many other writers are happy to publish for free? Or do writers need to accept that their skill must be leveraged into other income opportunities like book deals, speaking fees, etc.?

As someone who has done a good bit of freelancing — but never made it my full-time source of income — I’m not sure how to take Sonderman’s question. I can’t say I fault his logic.

The Web has killed many things that used to be staples — I’m looking at you, Travel Agent — is the freelancer on the path to a similar fate?

The Steubenville story — if you’re not familiar, here’s a primer —  has led to accusations that the town (or the sheriff or the football coach or the county) is covering up for the accused boys. And in a case as emotionally loaded as this one, the battle lines have been drawn among the community and WTOV9 has been left in the crossfire.

What makes this case notable from a journalistic perspective is that because WTOV is keeping with its internal policy to not name minors until they’ve been found guilty, the station (and its staff) have been accused of aiding in the “coverup” and refusing to report the “truth.”

Kovac alluded to  this problem when she discussed with students how misinformation had spread online and made their jobs more difficult:

“We had a lot of issues with how viewers perceived what was going on and it caused a lot of work to try and debunk those misconceptions,” she said. “It’s something we can’t ignore.”

Now, any journalist (or any j-student who’s had an intro class) knows that it’s not up to the media to determine guilt — that’s why the judicial system exists. And we know that we treat suspects as innocent until proven guilty (unless you’re on cable news, and then you make a career off of deciding for yourself who’s guilty and who’s not). Of course, regular citizens have no such qualms about waiting for pesky things like a jury verdict before determining guilt — and they’ve taken to social media to decry why WTOV has not done the same.

Now, it’s worth noting that I have no idea if the boys are guilty (the trial doesn’t even start until next week), but this story encapsulates the challenge for media organizations in the social media age: namely how they handle a world where every viewer or reader has their own platform to air grievances about real or perceived faults in the coverage — and possibly sway others’ perception of the same.

From my understanding of journalism ethics, WTOV9 is handling the case the right way. But since viewers who have assumed the boys’ guilt have an expectation to see them treated as guilty by the media, will the station’s credibility suffer in the eyes of viewers who think not naming the students is an abdication of responsibility? In the pre-social world, these arm-chair critiques would’ve gone no further than watercoolers or dinner tables, but thanks to participatory media, it’s spreading like wildfire and feeding and growing.

Now that social media has empowered audiences in a way not seen before, this is a situation that more and more newsrooms will be confronted with: an audience reared on Nancy Grace and mobilized by social media who think waiting for facts and not jumping to conclusion is a vice rather than a virtue.

“Social media information is a tip, not a source, and it needs to be researched intensively,” she said.

It’s a common-sense tip that several major media outlets have apparently forgotten in recent months as they’ve passed on hoaxes and bad information culled from the Web.