I’ve long thought that slapping a “gate” on everything mildly scandalous demonstrates a lack of creativity. It long ago branched into the realm of ridiculousness, but it’s officially come full circle: I give you watergate.
No, not that one. The one that describes a series of scandals and crimes in the early 1970′s which eventually forced a sitting president to resign. Which is a big deal.
You know what’s not a big deal? Somebody pausing to take a drink of water.
The “gate” suffix has gone from describing the biggest political scandal in a century or so to describing the mundane.
But between the truly scandalous and the mundane, there’s been a smattering of ridiculous. I give you:
These are, for the most part, society page items. No presidents lied to the American people. The leader of the free world didn’t resign. The whole world didn’t suddenly learn there was a Vice President (hat tip, Spiro Agnew, for making that office worth more than the proverbial “bucket of warm piss“).
I’m not the first one to notice this. But I’m a young reporter interested in the future of my profession, and we need to start getting more creative. C’mon, newsroom up-and-comings, let’s tell the world there’s a new suffix in town. If there’s a “gate,” let’s make sure it at least involves a hint of political scandal.
I was the first to report that former Democratic Congressman Mark Schauer had been pepper sprayed, which I found out while I was covering the state’s Right To Work protest for MIRS News. It was by accident.
I was getting footage in the fray outside the House Chamber when the House of Representatives was voting around noon. From the ground level, the scene was getting chaotic. There were both regular and mounted police at the scene, and everybody was on edge. I couldn’t really tell if the police were pushing in on the protestors or if the horses were getting spooked, but here’s the raw video:
Union protestors weren’t reacting well to the horses, and I turned around to interview one of them. It was while that was going on that pepper spray was deployed, so I didn’t actually see it. But, again in raw video, you can see the reaction of the person I was talking to:
After the pepper spray happened, the scene got chaotic. I had retreated a couple feet to interview protestor Sabrina Bailey, and I was reluctant to get back into the front. I had inhaled some of the pepper spray despite being I think pretty far away from its use. You can see the people in the video covering their mouths.
I was probably 50 feet away from the capitol at this point, but I could see that all the chants and organization had ceased — in a minute or so, the crowd had gone from a cohesive group to rouge individuals. Everybody was yelling something different, and the anger was at a maximum as people learned the House had passed the first of the Right To Work bills.
Then, all of a sudden, the crowd shut up. Everybody stopped talking and was straining to hear. “Who’s talking?” I asked protestors, pushing through the crowd. “What’s he saying?”
Nobody had an answer, but I eventually got to the man in the middle: Mark Schauer. He had a megaphone, he was standing on an orange bucket, and he’d somehow reinstated order — people were chanting and displaying less raw anger by the time I got to him. I didn’t get what he was saying when he was speaking, but here is him turning the speech into a chant (you can see him at the very beginning — look for the megaphone in the center of the shot).
He stepped down, I asked for an interview, and I led him out of the crowd so my camera could pick up his voice.
I shot the video asking him what happened because I wanted to know how he’d managed to diffuse what was looking like a bad situation. What I got was pepper spray, and I tweeted it because at that point I was tweeting everything.
It got quite a few re-tweets, and when Peter Spadafore (@pjspadafore) asked for verification I knew it was a bigger deal than I’d realized. Pete is one of the smarter people I know, and him wanting confirmation from more than one journalist to me meant I’d underestimated this.
I knew Schauer’s was a name that got floated for future elected positions, but I didn’t really put enough together to realize that he was a prospective gubernatorial candidate and this made him look like a RTW martyr.
I got inside and posted raw video kneeling on a couple square feet of real estate on the floor of the Capitol press room.
That video was then picked up by folks like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and other outlets did follow-up stories with confirmation or after-the-fact interviews with Schauer. Fine by me: word getting out about my outlet’s outstanding coverage doesn’t bother anybody.
To be clear I don’t have an agenda, I’m a truly neutral reporter, and I’ve had little interaction with Schauer (in recent memory, I covered him at one Proposal 2 event). I wasn’t working for MIRS when he was in Congress. In fact, my first question to him was along the lines of “You’re Mark Schauer, right?”
I didn’t directly see Schauer get sprayed. But what I did see happen was a very volatile situation get tamed by one man. To me, that’s the story here.
NOTE: This is not my best video work. Much was taken while getting jostled by folks and/or worming my way through a giant crowd with a tripod I didn’t have room to set down. I’ve posted raw video here because this is the raw story — for edited video of some of these events you can see my MIRS video re-cap of the protests here.
This story’s not over yet, but ProPublica’s Free The Files project is getting it right when it comes to ethically compiling campaign finance records.
The latest in ProPublica’s financial disclosure efforts takes advantage of a recent FCC ruling that compelled broadcasters in Top 50 markets to put their political ad buy information online. It’s a rule that’s been freshly deployed and will evolve a little over time — for now it’s just the largest 4 broadcasters in each Top 50 market that are compelled. But it’s a huge step forward for campaign finance reporting.
Previously, station files had been accessible but not readily available — you’d have to drive all over the country and crunch numbers for probably years to get a clear national picture of political ad spending. Now, they’re available but not aggregated. Although they’re on the web, they’re not searchable. Want to know how much money Obama’s spent on top 50 markets in Ohio? Have fun looking through the 1,568 available files in that state.
Enter ProPublica, the investigative, independent, non-profit newsroom. The publication has created what I think is a very good system that unlocks these files with public help, but without jeopardizing the integrity of sometimes-delicate campaign finance reporting.
The system is that you can “free a file” from any market you choose or randomly assigned. You look through the file and enter four bits of information you glean from it: which candidate or committee has purchased the ad, which advertising agency purchased it for them, what the order number was and the gross total of money spent. This process involves no training, but there is an example document highlighted.
Once you’ve done that, the information doesn’t go live. It takes another randomized document-reviewer typing in the exact same information for the results of that file to be aggregated. There’s a login process, so the same person isn’t allowed to type in the information for the same file twice.
That’s an important issue for me, because it prevents anybody from gaming the system. In other words, no one individual can try and convince people Joe Candidate has spend $7 million on one ad buy in Detroit unless it’s verified by another person. And even if the other person is in cahoots with the ill-intentioned party, since the files are randomized he or she may have to go through the 300+ files in Detroit to get to that one and incorrectly influence it.
Of course, the double-review system also prevents mistakes. If I accidentally type the order number in where the dollar amount is supposed to go, it’s not going to be reflected inaccurately unless somebody makes the same mistake. In addition, I’m pretty sure the order number and ad agency information isn’t for display, it’s just another check on accuracy.
Anyway, I’ve got an addictive personality and an active interest in accessing the compiled information for the two Michigan markets on the list, so I’m on the leaderboard here.
I’m sure this is the same, probably slightly pathetic reason I’m in the top 5 percent of BeJeweled players worldwide.
Even so, I’m glad there’s a lot of people like me out there who want a clear picture of what’s going on.
The caveat is that the information we’re getting is limited in a lot of ways: swing states, Top 50 markets, top 4 broadcasters. But this is an important step toward more full disclosure — it’s easier now to imagine the day when this information is available online for every market.
Note: it appears The Sunlight Foundation has its own effort going on to try to unlock these files. As it involves training and a sign-up, I’ll have to take some time to check into their system and report back.
While I deeply believe that a reporter should have an understanding of what he or she is reporting on before investing a single keystroke, I take deep issue with Sasha Issenberg’s recent idea of having journalists volunteer on campaigns to get a working knowledge of what goes on inside one.
Here’s my basic premise:
It’s a reporter’s job to accurately depict processes and scenarios they haven’t necessarily been a part of.
One of the things I enjoy most about being a reporter is talking to new people and learning new things all the time. I’ve reported on topics ranging from union contract negotiations to regulatory rules cramping swine ranchers. If anybody reading my stories expects me to have actually been at the bargaining table or have scooped pig poop to really understand these subjects, they’re nuts.
What I excel at is talking to the people who have been a part of these activities, knowing who I can talk to on and off the record on both sides of the issue, asking the right questions, and putting together a comprehensive story based on the information I receive and verify. I’m fully capable of educating my readers on these issues without having been a part of them personally.
I understand the political landscape is a different beast. It’s complex, it’s divisive, it’s an onion, it’s got layers (though for the record, I’m sure the insiders would say that about most any field). I do believe it’s the highest and best civic duty reporters have, and it’s got to be accurate. Issenberg brings up some interesting points where reporters are falling short — poll spin, for instance.
But the logistics behind this don’t work. Issenberg suggests reporters should volunteer on a political campaign to better understand internal goings-on such as voter targeting efforts and statistic calculations.
You know what entry level volunteers do for political campaigns? Stuff envelopes. Knock on doors. Make calls. And my guess is they’re not getting a full run-down of how each door they knock on was arrived at statistically.
That means to gain the knowledge Issenberg is aiming for with this whole idea, reporters would either have to receive special treatment from campaign staff or spend a lot of time working themselves up in a campaign. Both of these prospects leave me a little queasy in terms of non-bias, and that’s without considering the question of which party they’d even volunteer for.
Issenberg gets around this by saying he volunteered with Democratic campaigns since age 12, but stopped when he started reporting. Fine, ok. Not everybody’s done that. Is there a way to rewind? Take a hiatus from reporting? Should we just disqualify everybody whose parents didn’t push them into campaigning on the playground?
The most integral part of the accuracy we value in political reporting is non-bias, and I’d rather not have reporters stewing in what I understand is sometimes the all-encompassing, insulated atmosphere of a campaign office. That’s a in-kind donation, in a sense. You cross the line from outsider to insider, and frankly the insiders are often full of shit, which is why media exist (in an ideal world) as watchdog outsiders.
I think accurately reporting on any given subject without actually being a part of it is part of any reporter’s job.
Good news: a reporter during the Olympics scored and interview with Evander Holyfield, the only five-time heavyweight champion of the world. Bad news: the reporter had no idea.
It’s a quicky mash-up of people talking about how great the queen was in the opening ceremony, which I understand The Today Show isn’t holding up as the holy grail of journalism or anything. But I’m a little disturbed by the fact that this videographer may not have gotten these people’s names.
As a reporter, it’s important legally and ethically for me to have the names and contact information for everybody I’ve ever interviewed, as well as a rough transcript of our conversation. I organize this in a complicated system of business cards, files, e-mail folders and an address book. It’s a lot of work, but I consider it part of my job. Because if anybody ever challenges me on anything, I’d like a dated piece of material to reference in my defense.
I understand that these people didn’t need to be identified in the story. They’re man on the street style interviews, and the mash-up format makes it impossible to fit a name readably on the lower third. But I know I’m not the only reporter who at least has the names of everybody I interview.
Every TV reporter I’ve seen on a first contact has started their interview, camera rolling, in this manner:
Could you say your name and spell it please?
I’d hope that if a reporter got Evander Holyfield’s name, they’d recognize it. I’m not saying know all his stats and ask him on the spot how his ear is doing, but it’s not a common name. I think it should set off a “where have I heard that name? I’ll Google it” alert in most people’s heads.
I’m not sure whether the case is that somebody just didn’t have that bell go off, or they weren’t taking names. But I think that the latter is a disheartening possibility.
On the plus side, I completely loved the aftermath. Holyfield was very good-natured about the incident on Twitter.
And from his latter tweets, it appears he may even have gotten an appearence on The Today Show for this gaffe. That would be a good move on NBC’s part (is this compliment enough to keep them from banning my Twitter account? Heh heh heh.)
Note: I myself (@emilyjanelawler) am far from a perfect tweeter. However, I have time to perfect that before I’m a hugely public figure, and I’m a quick study.
I’m a Twitter participant and a Twitter observer, and lately some social media strategies (or lack thereof) have caught my attention. And I’m not just talking about the perfectly-named former Rep. Anthony Weiner, either.
Here’s a blanket statement: It’s not a good thing to see your Twitter activity in the media. If your Twitter feed is newsworthy, it’s standing out from a crowd of some really lewd, witty, ridiculous people. Think about your competition here. Chances are you’re not meeting any threshold of professionalism.
A recent example was a favorite public figure of mine, Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh. Mind you, Detroit City Council is notoriously ridiculous (see: last chairperson resigning amidst federal charges). But the City Council president picking an ego-fueled, public fight on social media with a 19-year-old Automotive News intern made several publications.
I say ego-fueled because @joshsidorowicz started with a tweet linking to an article that was critical of @Charles_Pugh’s timing in releasing a video of weight loss secrets. What started as Pugh trying to make the point that reporters shouldn’t be focusing on his abs (never mind that they’re the centerpiece of his weight loss secrets, which he’s been urging the press to cover) dissolved into Pugh trying to use his political influence to have Sidorowicz punished by his employer.
If you really have that kind of influence I’d have to believe that 1) you’d be successful (Automotive News kept Sidorowicz on) and 2) you’d do it behind the scenes. As much as I love Twitter, it isn’t a place where you take your grievances if you’ve actually got clout. And just from a public relations standpoint, it’s a terrible idea to engage this deeply.
I’d argue that the other extreme is being too upbeat. Like that character in some movies that’s so happy it makes people uncomfortable. I’d argue that the executives of the three big counties in Southeast Michigan go in that direction. There’s nothing distinguishing their tweets from, say, a corporation’s upbeat tweets about how awesome their products are. Only in this case, the products are counties.
The most confusing in his optimism is Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano, who oversees an administration under investigation by the FBI. There’s hardly a week that goes by where a story of overgenerous benefits, bribes, a whistleblower lawsuit or worse doesn’t hit the newsstands. But apparently he pays somebody $73,000 to keep his tweets cheery and never address any of those issues.
Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson (@BrooksPatterson), famous for his witty strikes, is perhaps the most disappointing in the lack of personality in his tweets. His Twitter description of himself bills him as “I’m the Oakland County Executive, known for telling it like it is.” But as far as his account reads, he only tells the happy, fluffy stuff like it is.
I realize not everybody is tweeting with the media in mind. But as some of the earliest adopters and most dedicated users of Twitter, you better believe we’re CRAWLING that business. Lists, alerts, constant refresh, apps — if you’re a public figure, you’re being watched 24/7.
And yet, even the media isn’t immune to tweeting petty things that don’t make us look any better. I leave you with a completely public and unnecessary exchange between two local reporters in #lovelansing:
Our goal is to teach the community to gather and report news on a variety of platforms, from creating video and podcasts to photo slideshows and sound slideshows to timelines, locator maps, info graphics, live tweeting, creating Storified compilations and databases, and become collaborators with Heritage.com, bringing the outside in and creating a transparent community newsroom.
A noble cause, but I think the journalism world can look to AOL’s Patch venture for why a lot of times hyper-local content doesn’t work. It’s not that important, not actually that local and most importantly not that interesting. I spent five minutes browsing some Michigan Patch posts and found the following stories I can’t imagine more than 10 people care about:
That said, I think the Heritage Newspapers project could address the problem of untrained community journalists. I’ve left “community” articles with grammatical hangovers and headaches from shaky cell phone video, so as a consumer I appreciate any attempts to clean it up.
But I think the issue is going to be what kind of talent pool the incubator has to work with. Heritage has established themselves in a college town, which may be good. Eastern Michigan University offers a journalism major, though it’s not accredited. That probably menas students are looking for opportunities to establish a good portfolio. Heritage also mentions that they want to recruit high school students, which sounds like a great idea.
But I have a different prediction for who will end up being interested: community activists.
I’ve sat through enough public comment sessions in state and local government to know that there are a lot of people that care deeply about issues but at the end of the day just aren’t informed on them. If Heritage is going to help them translate the half they do understand into a video or slideshow package and then distribute it as straight news, it’s a problem.
I think the challenge on this front will be aligning people’s interests and passions with journalistic and ethical standards. Because when it changes from “I want to cover this because these city council changes are bullshit and people ought to know about it” to “I’m covering this for Heritage Newspapers, let’s get both sides,” it’s work. Which is why newspapers have traditionally paid reporters. And hey, as a paid journalist I’m all for continuing that tradition.
But I’m also interested to see what (and who) comes out of this new venture in community journalism.
Note: I’m not clear on whether this content will have its own site or be featured on the websites of Heritage Newspapers. Also note: I browse many of the state’s papers every day, and think Heritage does a great job with local coverage.
The political reporters in my newsroom -- I'm center-right (www.mirsnews.com).
I was apparently selected to participate in the 2011 National Survey of Journalism & Communication Graduates through the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia. I bring this up not because I’m bragging (selection was random) but because the survey made me think a lot about the successes and pitfalls of my education.
I’ve said a couple times in my time since graduation that if I could do it over again, I’d pick a field to be an expert in and then target writing specifically to that area. If I’d discovered my passion for religious studies earlier, for instance, I could have majored in it and more accurately aim to be the next Lisa Miller. I also never explored fields like science, which I’ve always loved, because I knew I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab. But writing about what goes on in labs is a different story.
So at the end of the survey, it asked for me to give advice to future journalism students, and I wanted to do something that got at that core “why am I here?” angle. The results:
“Don’t go into journalism because you like to write. That helps, but I’ve found almost every other aspect of my job to be more important. If you have a passion for the beat you’re covering, a connection with your sources, an eye on your deadline, a hard-on for research, a healthy respect for ‘due diligence’ and a slightly inflated sense of justice, you might be in the right place.”
If I’d heard those words my freshman year at Michigan State University, I definitely wouldn’t have been swayed, because I’m stubborn, goal driven and confident in everything I pursue. But hey, maybe they’ll work as a sorting hat for somebody else.
Being a reporter, I’m also human (despite what some like to think). That means that every once in a while, I make a mistake. It sucks every time, but there’s different ways to fix it.
In my opinion the news organizations that fix mistakes in a transparent way are the most adept. Newspapers have been running a “corrections” section forever, but on the web that’s not really good enough. Newspapers are on shaky enough ground (right, so you’re supposed to have the paper from yesterday or the day before laying around, then cross-reference it with the corrected part, figure out which paragraph it effects and then wrap your mind around what that means. Have fun trying to get those 8 minutes of your life back.)
Thanks to jollyUK for licensing this under Creative Commons on Flickr.
When it comes to the online world, I’m a big fan of Slate‘s corrections policy. They generally reference a mistake at the bottom story in an editor’s note type of thing, and then link you back to the corrected sentence. I do web work. I know that whole anchor/flag in the text concept is annoying. But as a reader, it’s very nice to not have to figure out where the mistake originally appeared.
The second thing they do right is aggregate their mistakes in one place. In case you need to quickly reference a correction, it’s there. If you’re on the offended/misquoted end, you can furiously refresh your browser on that page until it tells you what’s changed where.
At my news organization, we’ve struggled a little bit with that sort of consistency. One editor pointed out a couple weeks ago that sometimes we run a correction but don’t correct the actual story. We also have what I think is an important line between what we announce as a correction and what we don’t. For instance, if I’m scrolling through a published story and realize a typo’s gotten though, I fix it on the back end and don’t do anything else. It’s different if I get a call from someone pointing out my math is wrong — that warrants an ASAP correction along with a correction run in the next edition.
Sometimes when people are mad about small things (“I wouldn’t quite describe that advocacy organization as progressive like you did in your story…”) it makes the most sense to either stand by your words or, if they have concrete evidence to the contrary, just change it in the story. For me, this applies most often to things that don’t at all change the meaning of a story.
I think what’s really bad is when news organizations correct something essential without mentioning it. It’s very frustrating to send someone an article and then find out that what’s up at that link now is different from what you’d forwarded them. We do a good job avoiding that kind of frustrating run-around.
In any case, I’m proud to say I haven’t had to correct anything in a month or so. I’m not sure if it’s the “bad things happen in threes” logic or what, but it seems to come and go in waves.
I think my biggest personal gaffe was quoting Michigan’s Director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development as saying one of this collegue’s ideas was “immature” instead of “premature.” This was how it was in my notes and everything, but I should have realized it was extremely out of character as I was typing things up. I just misheard. Every once in a while they’ll still tease me about it at Ag Commission meetings, but I try to keep it and all mistakes in a certain perspective; they’re OK if you put the right kind of band-aid on them.
I’ve been bitching for a couple years about how Facebook was more burden than tool. Today, I broke off our five-year relationship.
In 2006, I got my college acceptance letter and my friend Aislinn, a year older than me, was geeked. “Now you can sign up for Facebook!” she told me, explaining that it was a college-only club for cool kids. I didn’t really know what she was saying, but figured she probably knew what she was talking about. She set up my profile, using my senior picture as a profile photo.
In 2007, I started at Michigan State University (MSU). Facebook was great, because I could keep in touch will all of my Stoney Creek High School friends while making new connections at MSU. This was also probably my greatest period of Facebook use. I was constantly online during classes, checking if the cute dude that sat by me were single or looking at other people’s colleges through pictures. I remember joking with friends that I was “addicted” and browsing for probably more than an hour every day. I changed my profile picture to reflect my newfound (awesome) home.
In 2008 is when I started experiencing the first downside of Facebook, because people would post pictures of me at parties. “I’m going to need a job eventually,” I thought, deleting photos that looked scandalous. The sad thing was that in a lot of photos, I wasn’t actually drinking. I’d have a red cup at an residence hall event or something and think it looked suspicious enough to take down. But also in some I was drinking. So there.
In the summer of 2008, my favorite Facebook use occurred. I don’t remember why or how, but my best friends from college and I started a “thread” message titled Chimp Mauling. Facebook has mysteriously deleted this chat, but it’s continued every summer since (pictured). When I think of this group of friends, I think of Chimp Mauling and the hilarious messages that brightened my days when we were apart all summer.
In 2009, tides were a’changin’. I realized I liked the pictures more than anything else. I wasn’t really using Facebook to keep in touch with people — I was using it to avoid keeping in touch with people. I’d look at their pictures and think “Oh cool, they’re doing great.” That eliminates the important step of actually talking to old friends, and unfortunately I think I lost quite a few while thinking I was keeping in touch with a few clicks. I was also put off by the influx of non-college people joining what had once been at least a little exclusive. While it was nice to keep in touch with my friends, there were family members gossiping about what my friends and I were up to and I was faced with some awkward “I really didn’t want to know that about my middle-school cousin” dilemmas. I changed my profile picture to a non-current (although hilarious) one and backed off checking it every day. In other words, I made it a little less personal.
In 2010, it got even less personal. I un-joined as many groups as I could, mainly keeping ones that had only people I still kept in touch with in them. My house did have a page that was semi-useful for announcing parties and collecting utility money, but that’s pretty much where the usefulness ended. Also, I’d been a member of Twitter since 2008, and I found myself liking that a lot more. There were less whiners on there, because it was less tolerated. I remember somebody posting something stupid about how sad they were and my boyfriend complaining. “That’s not what Twitter’s for, take it to Facebook,” he said. I peeled back my profile even more and went on the site in general about once a week.
And now, on Sept. 22, 2011, I’m calling it quits. I’ve got 791 friends. I’ve got messages I love going back to. But I’ve got photos I downloaded, and I’m going forward armed with people I call and text every day. With real live phone numbers. And I’ve got real live friends. I’m tired of feeling obligated to go on Facebook (to un-add myself to groups people have put me in, un-tag myself from ugly photos, un-post embarrassing things on my wall, and un-invite myself to events from people I haven’t seen in three years.) I’m going to spend some time getting out and doing things. I knew it was over when I didn’t dislike the new updates. In fact, I didn’t have any feelings about #f8. I didn’t give a shit, which I took as a sign that our time together was at a natural end. I loved you once, Facebook. But good night (and good luck).
