8 Bits of Advice for Untrained Journalists

We are living in the age of the citizen journalist. Trained, professional journalists view these untrained journalists as part of yet another ploy by the very wealthy in their pathological quest for short-term profits whatever the cost (and that may very well include long-term profits). Not that journalism was a highly paid profession to begin with. At best, citizen journalism pays very little by way of money. Editors will cut these untrained journalists some slack, knowing that they lack the rigorous training they have themselves received. An untrained journalist may seek to improve his skills by seeking out books about various facets of journalism, and reading current as well as old newspapers and magazines. But perhaps nothing will prepare him for the challenges he might face being untrained. Hence these eight bits of advice for untrained journalists:

1.

The closer your article comes to reading like the press release the subject gave you, the more they will like the article. I am not the first to say this. When I heard an old journalism professor say this, I immediately knew it to be true, because it meshed with my own experience. In fact, I have come to suspect that if someone gives you a press release and you just plagiarize it verbatim, they will say that it is the best article anyone has ever written about them. Of course I havent tested this theory because that would be plagiarism. I am not saying that you should only write articles that paraphrase press releases yet read different enough not to be considered plagiarism. It will be up to you to carefully weigh how important it is for a particular company or organization to like you, and whether or not that is worth getting on their good side for. As a rule of thumb, small to mid-size organizations are the most likely to be very skittish as to what gets written about them. Really small organizations are grateful for whatever publicity they get, while large organizations understand that almost all publicity is good for them, and are in any case too busy to carefully monitor every little thing that is written about them. Although individuals might not have press releases, they may have some kind of mythology about themselves that they

expect articles written about them to repeat and reinforce. They will dislike articles you write about them if you deviate in the slightest way from their mythology.

2. Remember: freedom of speech can cut

both ways. Just as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution gives you the right to write articles and say whatever you want in them, so too does it give people who, for whatever reason, dont like the article you wrote, to post very negative comments about the article and about you. Resist the temptation to respond in kind. Resist also the temptation to turn the other cheek; it will be taken not as a sign of Christianity but a sign of weakness. Your best course of action is to be aware of the comments but not respond. Only if the comments cross into definitive hate speech should you take any action, and that action should be one that leads to the removal of the comments. I for one have let thinly veiled anti-Semitic comments slide. After a few weeks, website maintenance removed all the comments without my having to do or say anything.

3.

You know what your job is (and if applicable, so does the one who signs your paycheck). You will run across people who think they know exactly what your job is, namely to write flattering articles about

them which closely follow their own mythology about themselves. Some of these people who tell you that is your job will be more obvious about it than others. It is perhaps best not to respond to such remarks, but do remind yourself what your job really is, and why it is that you started doing this kind of work in the first place. Job descriptions from someone disappointed that your article was slightly less flattering than they would have liked should hold no water with you. If its your boss telling you what your job is, then thats different.

4. Let people know when they are on or

off the record. Some people will tell you great stuff when they think their words will be gone as quickly as the wind that carried them. No matter how accurately you quote them and how uncontroversial their remarks were, there is a sense of betrayal when they see their supposedly off-the-cuff remarks in your article. This betrayal may cause them to be needlessly guarded in situations that dont call for discretion. Thus, if someone tells you something that immediately makes you think you want to use in your article and there might be any confusion as to whether its for the record or not, you should ask something like Can I quote you on that in the article? Other cues you can use to let people know their words may appear in the article are to scribble in your notepad or to adjust your audio recorder.

different from what was covered in class. When you read in an article from a major newspaper that so-and-so spoke on the condition of anonymity, the Readers expectation is that there was a big discussion in the news room where the informational value of the source, the credibility of the source and the legal ramifications for the reporter and the newspaper were all carefully weighed. With you as an untrained journalist, on the other hand, what will the Readers think when they see an unnamed source in your article? At best theyll think youre lazy (perhaps you forgot to get the sources name and were too lazy to track them down once you decided to use what they said in your article), and at worst that you are dishonest (that you are making stuff up and putting it in someones mouth while being able to deny who that someone is). I dont need to tell you not to invent sources, right? The next few items are somewhat more generic, and applicable to all journalists.

6.

5.

Dont use unnamed sources. But trained journalists use unnamed sources all the time, you might object. Yes, they do, they have the training for it. Something tells me that more than half the time in a journalism ethics class is spent on the topic of unnamed sources. Also, out of school and at a newspaper, a trained journalist also has the support of his editor and colleagues, should a situation arise that is markedly

Headlines and lead lines should grab the attention. In an ideal world, people would read every single word that you write. But in the real world, people can get distracted or lose interest for almost any reason at any point in your article. Thus, in the lead line, you need to strike a balance between generic statements that could apply to almost anything and specific statements that might interest only a very small portion of your readership. Broadly sweeping generic statements will have your Readers wondering when you will get to the point, or worse, assume that you never do get to the point. For example, consider an article that starts off saying some people are content to do the bare minimum. Then the second paragraph talks about how some doctors will perform the least amount of due diligence necessary to

stave off a medical malpractice lawsuit. Then, three paragraphs down, the article finally mentions Dr. Liying-Hyung Zhao, M.D., and her innovative method that could perhaps greatly reduce complications in laparoscopic hysterectomies. But at the other extreme, if you have trouble pronouncing someones name or some jargon, dont start your article off with either of those. Maybe Dr. Z is better mentioned in the second line of the first paragraph. Likewise, the term laparoscopic hysterectomy should perhaps not occur in the first line. In the first line, you can refer to a procedure that is common among women of a particular age and uses a special device to look at internal organs. Later on in the article you can give the term and elaborate on what exactly it is, what are the problems associated with it and what Dr. Z is doing to solve those problems. Headlines are something that most trained journalists at newspapers dont have to worry about. The headline will depend on how much space the article is allotted on the page. But as an untrained journalist working on a website, coming up with a headline usually falls to you. The headline needs to be brief and extremely generic, but nevertheless hint that you are reporting about something unique. Consider the headline John Martinez wins Fields Medal. Who is John Martinez? What is a Fields Medal? People who dont know the answer to either question probably wont want to read the article. What if instead the headline was Homeless man wins math award? That sounds like a very unusual occurrence. There is of course more to John Martinez than being a homeless man, even if none of his achievements are ever recognized. The article can delve into that. The headline must of necessity be somewhat one-dimensional. Unless your boss expressly gives you guidance to the contrary, there shouldnt be

peoples names in your headlines if they are not literally household names, regardless of their stature on the world stage. For example, Obamas name can appear in a headline. James Franklin Jeffrey not so much (hes the U. S. Ambassador to Iraq, as of this writingbetter to refer to him as an American ambassador or something like that in the headline). Earlier I said headlines should be brief. But how brief? Because of Twitters 140character limit, I would suggest no longer than 70 characters. Suppose your headline is 65 characters. A shortened URL might run to 15 characters. This leaves about 60 characters that you can use for hashtags. NOTE: Aside from Obama, Jeffrey and Mitch Albom, all the people named in this document are fictitious.

7. If you must have external links, choose

better than Wikipedia. Some Internet news organizations practically require you to include external links in your article (besides the links from advertisersyou have almost no control over those). You would think they would prefer you not to add any external links, the reasoning being that they dont want people to ever leave the site except to go to the site of an advertiser. However, just putting a single external link near the end of your article, targeted for a new blank window, might satisfy them on all counts. But, if you have to have external links on your articles, then there is the question: what do you link to? Wikipedia is an easy out for almost any topic. The top search result for almost anything tends to be a Wikipedia article. However, this easy out is more trouble than its worth. The problem with Wikipedia is that no one is accountable for its content. Not the heads of the Wikimedia Foundation, who get paid more than most non-profit directors yet dont do much of anything for

Wikipedia. Nor are the people who actually do the bulk of the work editing Wikipedia responsible for its content either, as they hide behind either cryptic user names or IP addresses that can be very difficult to track down. Contrast that to articles in a newspaper or a news website. If you get caught putting lies in your articles, youre going to get fired. Like if you publish an interview with two basketball players but then its discovered you didnt even show up to talk to them (unless youre Mitch Albom, in which case the newspaper is going to be too afraid of losing subscribers to fire you). Nothing at all happens to someone who puts lies into Wikipedia, unless their conscience gets the better of them and they confess. But factual inaccuracy isnt the only thing that should give you pause about Wikipedia. Since you cant really know whos writing Wikipedias content, it is also difficult to know what their particular biases might be. Wikipedia has a policy for NPOV (neutral point of view), but the writers obey that as much as drivers obey laws against using cell phones while driving, which is to say, not very much. By putting external links on your article, you are vouching that the linked content is good (this doesnt apply to the ads, since your Readers will of course understand that its the company putting those on). With Wikipedia, that is a very gutsy thing to do, since Wikipedia can change quite unexpectedly, and usually not for the better. Worse, people may think that you used Wikipedia in researching your article, and that way, Wikipedias accountability and credibility problems attach to your article. If your article has to have external links, it is much better to link to the official website of the person or organization youre writing about than to any Wikipedia article.

8.

Follow a machine spell check with a human spell check. I am always surprised by what the computer flags as wrong and what it lets slide. But I am also grateful for the typos it corrects: I can feel that my fingers have slipped on the keyboard, but Microsoft Word nevertheless understands just what it was that I meant to type. Just the same, after running the computer spell check, you should read your article over again once more. I know that if youve been working on the article for a very long time, this can be very tiresome. But you should do it, to make sure there arent any unexpected mistakes. At this point it might also be a good idea to do a jargon check, especially if you got into this whole journalism deal because of your expertise on some very specialized topic, like medicine or the military (Ive picked here as examples two fields notorious for their casual use of jargon). Someone without your expertise should still be able to read and understand your article. Thus, you should either avoid technical jargon or make sure you define it right in the article, taking care to define each instance of a technical term the very first time it occurs. As a bonus, heres a bit of advice just for student journalists, who may or may not be journalism majors: let the copy editors do their job. Of course they will make changes to your article, whether or not you know AP style. Writing a news article is a vastly different undertaking from writing a sonnet or a novel. There are many valid reasons for editors to make changes to your article after you submit it, such as that there is not enough room for your article in the final layout, or there is breaking news that renders some of what you wrote wrong or irrelevant. There may be good reasons to quit your student newspaper, but they change my articles is not one of them.