He's just doing his job

Check out this photo on The Denver Post website. It accompanies a story about pat downs at the Denver International Airport. I know that's what the story is about, but I don't know if I'd run this one. Call me a prude, but I'm worried about the effect publication would have on those pictured. There are other interesting photos at the Post website. Would you run them?

Stop stereotyping journalists!

I'm reading another great novel by Jodi Picoult. This one is called "Nineteen Minutes," and it's as captivating as her other books. But like everything else, this book ain't perfect.

The story involves a high school student who kills 10 of his classmates after being bullied all his life. While in jail awaiting trial, he receives a letter from someone who says she's a graduate student researching the effects of bullying. It turns out that the letter writer is actually a reporter for Time magazine, trying to get a story. This is an old, sorry stereotype of journalists, and I wish writers would stop using it. I have never heard of a case of a reporter lying to get a story like this.

The fact that a popular, talented writer like Picoult would perpetuate this stereotype offends me. And it should offend all journalists. Yes, a few reporters have lied over the years. Yes, a few reporters have made up or plagiarized stories. But it seems like every time a journalist is a character in a novel or movie, he or she is portrayed as unethical. Can we please get some good journalists into the mix? After all, the overwhelming majority of journalists are ethical.

Please let writers know about this post. Thanks.

When was that?

One of the biggest problems my students have is unclear writing. This is a problem because when readers can't understand something, they may just stop reading it. Clarity is especially important for journalists who want to go into television or radio news. Broadcast news must be clear because viewers and listeners can't reread what they don't understand.

I came across some unclear writing today in Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine for journalists. You'd think that such a magazine would want to avoid unclear writing at all costs, if only to escape snarky readers like me. Here's the lead that confused me:

"In 1974, Jack Klunder, president and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News, discovered that his 1966 Ford Mustang had been stolen from a college parking lot."

(I don't know if Klunder's Mustang was red, but I really like Mustangs, and I found this photo online.)

That's confusing in two places, come the think of it. First, the sentence implies that Klunder was the president and publisher of the newspaper in 1974. But that's not the case, according to the rest of the story. To fix this, the writer might have written "In 1974, Jack Klunder, now president and publisher ..."

The second problem stems from the fact that the author includes two years in the sentence. It's just plain confusing. I had a teacher in college who told us "numbers are numbing." It's true. The more figures a sentence contains, the more confusing it becomes. I would solve this problem by inserting the model year of the car a bit later in the story.

Clarity is worth working toward. If you find something in this post that seems unclear, post a comment.

Keeping the election in context

One thing journalists don't do enough of it put events into context. You can throw facts at the audience all you want, but to really tell the story, you have to tell them what those facts mean. Brendan Nyhan discusses what the media did wrong on this front in a piece in the Huffington Post. He covers both sides well.

One problem seems to be that it's too easy to analyze statistics. You can make statistics back up just about any point. But what people often forget is that correlation not the same as causation. Here's one example from Nyhan's story:

Under the headline "Crushed," Josh Marshall noted that "Of the 39 Dems who voted against Health Care Reform, 12 are going to be returning in the next Congress," suggesting that opposition to reform was a cause of these members' defeats. However, he failed to note that most of anti-HCR members represented competitive districts and that vulnerable Democrats who opposed reform appeared to perform somewhat better than their pro-HCR counterparts.