References for journalists

Preview stories (handout) HTML, PDF

Obituary stories (handout) HTML, PDF

Speech stories (handout) HTML, PDF

Notes

David Halberstam, reporter. David Halberstam represented many things to the profession of journalism. Most of all, I think, he demonstrated that a reporter who does his job can make a difference. Halberstam was one of the first people to say that we were wrong to be in Vietnam in the early 1960s. He did this not out of ideological bent -- he had been a supporter of our efforts there -- but because he had been in country and had seen how much the situation there differed with the official version that the U.S. government was trying to propogate. Halberstam's reporting and information led him to his opinions (not the other way around). He laid all of this out in his best-selling 1973 book, The Best and Brightest. Even after Vietnam, Halberstam continued to be reporter. He wrote about the media, the generations, the auto industry and sports. To each of those subjects he devoted the dogged determination of a reporter trying to get the facts and understand the people involved in a story. He was doing just that when he was killed in a car accident in California earlier this week. He was on his way to interview a source for his latest book. He was 73 years old. Here are tributes and other information about Halberstam:
• Fresh Air interviews with Halberstam
• Roy Peter Clark, David Halberstam: Witness to War, Poynter Institute
• Jon Meacham, The Best and the Brightest, Newsweek
• Henry Allen, A Journalist for Whom There Were Not Enough Words, Washington Post
(Posted April 27, 2007)

The writer's life, Gay Talese style. For decades now, readers and critics have focused on Gay Talese's writing style. In the 1960s he was a pioneer of the New Journalsim, which used fictional and literary techniques to tell his nonfiction stories. But what readers should have been focusing on was his reporting, which is meticulous, exacting and precise. Talese, according to the New York Times, is about to release his memoir, A Writer's Life, which should give us some insight into his reporting methods. It will be a welcome addition to the literature of Talese and for his legion of fans.
More (Posted April 23, 2006)

Bonds hoisted on his own Louisville slugger? It would be a reporter's dream: Barry Bonds answering questions under oath -- with two reporters in the room. That could be one of the outcomes of the suit that San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds has filed against Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who have written a book about Bonds' use of steriods to make him baseball's all-time home run king. Chances are it won't happen because a judge is likely to dismiss the suit sometime soon. Still, it's nice to dream.
More (Posted March 26, 2006)

The center of gravity has shifted. The web has pretty much rendered obsolete the adage that says you should never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel and newsprint by the ton. Today there is less fear and frustration with the news media on the part of those outside the profession, and there is more willingness to take issue with the decisions of reporters and editors. The web has given those who believe they have been mistreated a forum and a voice -- and it is forcing the redefiniton of the relationship between reporter and source. Katharine Seelye has an excellent article about that this week in the New York Times.
More (Posted Jan. 3, 2006)

First reporting assignment: a preview story. It's the first week of class in your reporting class. Your students are bright and eager -- and they don't have a clue about what they are supposed to do. You want to get them into the field quickly, but you're afraid (rightly so) to unleash them on an unsuspecting campus.

The solution: a preview story. It's a simple, straightforward assignment and will give them some confidence as they get into the reporting game. JPROF.com has some thoughts about the preview assignment and an example for your students to follow in either HTML or PDF form. More.

High school journalist, undercover. David McSwane wanted to do "something cool." What he did wound up shutting the entire U.S. Army's recruiting effort down for a day. McSwane is a senior at Arvada West High School in Colorado; he's an honors student there and editor of high school newspaper, The Westwind. When he heard that the Army was failing to meet its recruiting goals because of the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, he decided to find out just how far the service would go to sign someone up. That's when things started to get interesting.
More (Posted May 27, 2005)

The Numbers Guy. Numbers are funny things -- especially for journalists. They sound so definite and authoritative. Numbers represent facts in a seemingly indisputable way. They are easy to use and easy to understand. But numbers should always be checked for context and source. One journalist who regularly examines the source and context of numbers is Carl Bailik, a Wall Street Journal reporter who writes a column called The Numbers Guy. This column is one of the free features of the Wall Street Journal web site, and those interested in good reporting should check it regularly.
More (Posted May 25, 2005)

Women as news sources. Women do not make it into news stories as sources as much as men do. That is the basic finding of a new study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The basic finding is probably not surprising, but what is impressive and important is how widespread and consistent is the tendency of journalists to use men rather than women as sources of information. The study looked at 16,000 news stories in 45 different news outlets. Researchers coded the gender of the sources quoted in the stories and found that “men are relied on as sources in the news more than twice as often as women.” This is the case despite the fact that news organizations have made efforts to get more women into the ranks of reporters and editors and women are taking more active roles in business and public life. “The numbers suggest that the representation of women as sources in the news has a significant distance to go towards reflecting their role in American society generally,” the study says. (Posted May 24, 2005)

The "essentially accurate" standard. Abraham Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address with the words, "About a century ago, the dudes that started it all . . ." Well, ok. Those weren't exactly the words, but they are "essentially accurate." That's the standard that Detroit Free Press sportswriter Mitch Albom imposed upon himself in handling direct quotations for his column. Apparently, some of the editors at the newspaper were willing to live with that standard, too. But that is not the standard that those of us who teach journalism want to pass on to our students. What we want is for our students to be meticulous in their pursuit of accuracy. More. (Posted May 17, 2005)

Reporting religion. Journalists don’t have an easy time with religion. Religion and religious topics are not particularly welcomed in a newsroom. That is why years such as 2004, when religion is a big part of some of the year’s biggest stories (gay marriage, the presidential election, Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of Christ,” etc.) are tough for journalists. Why then are editors and news directors eliminating their religion beats or assigning untrained reporters to them? That’s the question that Julia Duin, religion reporter for the Washington Times, poses in an excellent centerpiece article for Poynter.org. Duin says that if religion beat reporters are hired at all, they come with little experience, and the situation does not seem to be getting better. Duin’s article contains a link to the web site for the Religion Newswriters Association. If you have a student interested in this area, this web site would be a good place to keep up with the latest developments. (Posted Jan. 6, 2005)
Update: Since the posting of Duin's article, a couple of other journalists have chimed in with their thoughts, and they're worth reading too. Steve Buttry, national correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald, offers a counterpoint to some of Duin's ideas about improving religion coverage, and Diane Conolly discusses her assignment as a novice to the religion beat. Conolly is the editor for ReligionLink.org, a excellent resouce for reporters and others interested in coverage of religion. A number of other people have posted comments about all of these articles on the Poynter site. (Posted Jan. 12, 2005)

Writing obits. For generations, the journalism culture demanded that young reporters cut their teeth on obituary stories – “writing obits,” we would say. The thinking was that obituaries were easy to write and possibly not very interesting or important. Today, in many newspapers (except for the larger ones), the obit story has been relegated to a classified advertisement. But writing obits is important work. It always has been. Bert Barnes spent 20 years at the Washington Post writing obituaries before retiring in March 2004.  He has written an article for the Post about his experiences on the obit desk. In it he says:

I loved that work. It taught me that even in the monotony of the daily grind, life could be funny and beautiful, surprising and strange. Death is no big deal if you don't love life. I only wish I could have met more of the people I wrote about.

One of the first exercises I had in a beginning news writing class in college was to write my own obituary. All of us in the class had to do that, and we had a lot of fun with it. I remember trying to figure out who the pallbearers would be. I still think that’s a good assignment for a beginning student because they have all the information available without having to interview anyone or look anything up. For an example of an obituary story, look on page 186-187 of Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.

The standard parts of an obituary story are explained more fully in a JPROF handout, available on this site as an HTML file or as a PDF file. Either of these can be downloaded and duplicated for classroom use.

Context in reporting. One of the criticisms of journalism is that reporters report events as events only, rather than giving them any context. That is, they do not relate these events to other events or information that would help a reader understand them more fully. Stephen Downes, a Canadian educator, has written a short essay on how reporters can introduce more context into their reporting.

Interviewing. One of the skills a reporter must develop is the art of interviewing. The text pays a good deal of attention to helping students develop this skill. For more information about interviewing, start with this article, The Art of Asking Questions (http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=60848) from the Poynter Institute.

Math. Many journalists say (sometimes jokingly, sometimes not) that they got into the profession because they would not have to deal with a lot of math. For most working reporters, however, that turns out not to be the case. They have to deal with math every day. A good reporter should know how to figure a ratio, an average, a median and a percentage. Here are some web sites that will help you out:

• NilesOnline.com (http://nilesonline.com/stats/)
• Investigative Reporters and Editors (with a terrific math test: http://www.ire.org/education/math_test.html)
• University of North Carolina math competency test for journalists (http://www.unc.edu/~pmeyer/carstat/mathtestquestions.html)
• Poynter.org: Why Math Matters by Chip Scanlan (with additional links) (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=52&aid=71048)

Plagiarism. Students sometimes get mixed up about what constitutes plagiarism, but journalists should never let that happen. They should understand that plagiarism is one of the worst things they can do, and they should know how to avoid it. Here is what the Detroit Free Press has to say about plagiarism:

When material is used in a story from sources other than the writer's own reporting, those sources--other publications, previous Free Press stories, radio or TV newscasts, etc.--should be indicated in the story. That attribution need not be made for simple, verifiable facts like dates, but is essential for information that goes beyond simple fact-quotations or descriptions not heard or seen by the current reporter, characterizations or other generalizations not based on the writer's own reporting, etc...

Using someone else's work without attribution -whether deliberately or thoughtlessly--is a serious ethical breach. Staff members should be alert to the potential for even small, unintentional acts of plagiarism, especially in the reporting of complicated stories involving many sources.

Borrowing ideas from elsewhere, however, is considered fair journalistic practice. Problems arise in the gray areas between the acceptable borrowing of inspiration and the unacceptable stealing of another's work. Our standards:

Words directly quoted from sources other than the writer's own reporting should be attributed. That may mean saying the material came from a previous Free Press story, from a television interview, from a magazine or book or wire service report.

When other work is used as the source of ideas or stylistic inspiration, the result must be clearly your own work. That is, what is acceptable to learn from another are the elements of style and approach-tone, rhythm, vocabulary, topic ideas-and not specific words, phrases, images.

You can find what other codes of ethics have to say about plagiarism at Journalism.org.

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