#344 One reporter’s fumbled joke and a lesson learned

It was supposed to be a lighthearted, playful joke in a sports-loving city.

The week before the Super Bowl, Michael Telek wanted to have a little fun on a sports story at his CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh. The story was about how the New England Patriots were on their way to a record-tying Super Bowl, on the edge of matching the Steelers’ record for most Super Bowl wins.

When an image of Tom Brady came up, he set up the reporter package to identify him as a “known cheater.”

Michael Telek and a screenshot of his joke about Tom Brady.

Telek lost his job the next day.

“I had been there seven months. I’m from Pittsburgh, I wanted to work in Pittsburgh,” he said. He spent time in Ohio and other markets in order to work his way back to his hometown. The KDKA station was a great place, filled with people who made him a better journalist, he said.

“I thought it would be fun at the end” of a newscast geared toward more national news, not one that featured more local stories. “Sports are meant to be fun and playful. Everyone hates the Patriots.”

He had considered a different graphic, identifying Brady as “Giselle’s husband,” flipping on its head a sports trope in which successful women are identified by their relationship with an athlete.

“I thought ‘known cheater’ would be funnier, especially with the deflate gate situation and the NFL suspending him,” Telek said. “I thought I could save face. My bosses talked to me after the broadcast and asked what were you thinking, this is PR nightmare, it’s all over social media already.”

Disliking Brady, after all, has become an easy punchline in cities well beyond Pittsburgh. People don’t have to know or be interested in sports or football to know who he is and know details of his life – in fact, one of Telek’s friends who doesn’t follow sports thought the “known cheater” was in reference to Brady leaving his then-pregnant girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, for his now-wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

By the next morning, it was on every sports news outlet in the country, including Sports Illustrated, and other sites, like Breitbart.

If the package had aired in the sports portion of the broadcast, Telek thinks it might have been easier to shrug off, to play off as a joke. He acknowledges that even though sports stories can be lighthearted, one that airs during a news portion has to stay within the non-biased, impartial lines of ethical journalism.

Michael Telek joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss a sports joke gone wrong and the need to play things straight even when the target of a joke is one of the most unpopular and talented athletes in history.

#295 — Putting sports second, athletes first

#343 Leave Facebook and fake news wins

It’s the new cool kid thing to do: Declare that the time has come to leave Facebook, complete with a long post about how it’s not working anymore, it’s too corrupted, it’s no longer fun.

Mandy Jenkins thinks people, especially reporters, should reconsider. In fact, she says leaving Facebook or social media in general is the last thing journalists should do.

“Why are you leaving and letting the disinformation providers take it over?” she asked. “The more we leave, the more they’re going to have the market share of attention.”

Jenkins currently is a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. In addition to taking courses, all fellows work on a research question, publishing a report at the end of their term. For Jenkins, an early adopter of social media and an unabashed and unashamed social media junkie, she’s taking a closer look at fake news and the people who make and spread it.

“We can we learn from fake news purveyors as real news purveyors,” she says. “I’m going out and talking to people who have shared misinformation before, really getting into their media habits, what they think about social media, the media in general, and I’ll distill that down into a report I’ll put out at the end of my fellowship.”

Facebook is no saint, Jenkins admitss. She understands the impulse to leave, but every time a journalist leaves, “a little part of me dies inside. Other people are still here. I’m still here. As a friend, I still want to know what’s going on with you,” but she’s not inclined to follow those people to whatever new, unfamiliar platform they’re going to, and it’s unlikely their readers will follow them either.

Many journalists will use Facebook to not only post their work but to interact with friends and family, blurring the line between personal and professional. It can be difficult to find the right balance, but when it’s done well, it can be a very useful tool and a great way to lead conversations, she says.

“It’s really hard work to do social media well,” Jenkins said. “You have to be a conversation leader to make Facebook work. You have to go in, ask questions, take on some hard questions from other people, even get into the fray a little bit and sometimes break up fights between other people. That goes for family and friends as well as readers and peers you interact with on Facebook. It takes time but it can be so valuable.”

Friend of the podcast Mandy Jenkins returns to talk with producer Michael O’Connell about why journalists who leave Facebook due to fake news or other controversies are just helping the bad guys win.

#279 — Collaboration key to combating fake news

#342 Moving the State of Digital Publishing forward

The homepage of a website is not the end-all, be-all, but that’s how most companies and newsrooms think.

Others are concerned with driving traffic to the “join now” link on a page. That shouldn’t be the end goal either.

Vahe Arabian is the host of The State of Digital Publishing.

Vahe Arabian, founder of the State of Digital Publishing podcast and website, creates tools to help online publishers go beyond their superficial focus and dig deeper. He believes a good, strong practice of and expertise in search engine optimization is among the most important things a publisher should consider.

It’s also one of the most overlooked and misunderstood parts of the digital publishing world, he says.

Good SEO practices are “not widely disseminated,” he said. “Not even bigger publications like the Guardian, even if they have their own dedicated R&D department, it’s not being spread widely. I’ve seen other departments in the company not doing the same thing,” not applying the best practices used in one end of the building to another.

Based in Australia, Arabian said the United States and United Kingdom are more developed and more advanced than where he’s currently working.

“The main publishers here at the time were not really focusing on audience development and SEO. In the U.S. it was as big driver,” he said. “In Australia currently we have Fairfax and News Corp and a lot of publishers are working from there or are magazine publishers that are still starting to focus on digital first.”

Publishers are just starting to understand the need to transform and re-think old ways, embracing Google and Facebook as ways to drive traffic.

“Having a network is valuable,” he said. “Not having a dedicated online resource is what’s missing.”

It’s also what he’s working to build with his website and podcast.

“I like to focus on start-up potential and new ideas coming from there,” Arabian said. He also enjoys diving into the “martech” (marketing technology) platforms, talking with developers and solutions providers who are looking to focus on technology with enthusiasm as a way to move their audience forward.

Vahe Arabian, host of the State of Digital Publishing podcast and an author at the website of the same name, talks with producer Michael O’Connell about the importance of a shared SEO policy and practices across a publication and why building networks is a valuable investment.

#164 – Is marketing the Devil’s work?

#341 Use a little Shoeleather to find freelancers

When a national story breaks, editors outside of major media hubs often consider sending reporters to small towns across the country to get “boots on the ground” coverage.

Wouldn’t it be easier, cheaper and, perhaps, more effective if they could hire someone who understands the people at the heart of the story?

Sarah Baird, a freelance journalist based in New Orleans, thinks so. She believes locally based reporters are better able to provide fuller, richer and deeper articles in a more comprehensive, detailed way than those who “parachute” in for a few days and then fly out.

“If you’re a local journalist, you’re invested in your community, invested in different angles,” she said. “You’re going to be able to provide a ton of context, history and backstory and a level of concern about where you’re from than someone who’s parachuting in and just has the lineup of people they know they have to talk to and then leaving. The quality and well-roundedness is not going to be comparable.”

With this premise squarely in min, Baird created Shoeleather, a database with more than 1,000 journalists from across all 50 states and U.S. territories, available at a moment’s notice to cover stories not in New York; Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

It’s free for journalists to enroll. They simply provide their primary and secondary cities and states along with any demographic information that could offer additional insight into coverage (LGBT status, whether they’re a person of color, whether they’re living with a disability, etc). Once approved, editors from around the country have access to their information and profiles and can call on them to report on the ground on a national story, or one of particular interest to that publication.

“It’s a matchmaking service without the middleman,” Baird said. “Editors and writers can connect directly via websites and social media. Editors can figure out which writer might be the best fit and can contact them. It’s free; that’s something that’s incredibly important. It’s not behind a paywall. Not only is it an exercise in ensuring editors can get in touch with local writers in an easy and seamless fashion, it’s a visibility thing. There’s an erroneous assumption that there aren’t a ton of writers in rural areas and there are.”

Like many people, she was dismayed by people flying in to rural areas after the 2016 election to “understand” rural voters, instead of just hiring people who lived in far-flung communities outside major cities to explain their environments.

The idea of a database of freelance writers across the country seemed so obvious, Baird was shocked to learn it didn’t yet exist. So she made one.

Shoeleather is expanding into the U.S. territories and will kick off a newsletter featuring success stories. “It’s interesting to see how the tool is being used in ways I didn’t anticipate,” she said. “A lot of regional papers in places like Houston and Atlanta have been able to use Shoeleather to connect with people in smaller communities in metro areas. They’re able to reach out to someone in town to write the story.”

Freelance journalist Sarah Baird joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain the impetus behind Shoeleather, a database of journalists who live outside of major media hubs, and how the inspiration came in part from covering a wrestling match between a man wearing a Make Wrestling Great Again shirt and one called the Progressive Liberal.

#340 Genre films continue to dominate box office in 2018

Every January, journalists of all stripes look back to assess what the biggest stories of the previous year were. Nowhere is this annual reflection more noticeable than on the entertainment beat, where book reviewers and movie critics roll out their year-end Top 10 lists.

Last year, It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell sat down with Jason Fraley, the entertainment editor at WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C., to discuss his Top 10 movie list for 2017 and top grossing movies of that year. Fraley is back on the podcast this week with his latest year-end review.

“I enjoyed that there was a lot of range in the year,” Fraley said, of the 2018 crop of movies. “I think that the top, top movies were, I’d say, a cut below some previous years. One year you had Boyhood, Birdman, there were several big juggernauts released the same year, so I’d say a slight down tick on the top ones. But in terms of the general range, I’m super thrilled with it.”

It was in 2018 that for the fist time a genre film — The Shape of Water — took home the best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards Ceremony.

Genre movies continue to be among the top grossing movies of the year as well as the most critically acclaimed.

“Even the blockbuster superhero [film] was Black Panther, which we’re definitely going to get to near the top of the list. That was fantastic,” Fraley said. “That was a well made movie that was also the box office champ. A Quiet Place, just like Get Out last year, horror flicks were really well done and seen by a lot of people. That was, I think, in the top 15 of the box office, but also super well done, really acclaimed.”

But, Fraley assures us that serious movie lovers need not fret, musicals like A Star Is Born and festival darlings such as Roma, If Beale Street Could Talk, Green Book and BlacKkKlansman drew a great deal of attention from critics and moviegoers alike.

“In terms of overall macro-level, I think there was a lot of range this year, which I really appreciated,” Fraley said. “Because not every year you great great movies in every genre like that.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O’Connell welcomes WTOP entertainment editor Jason Fraley back to the podcast to discuss his Top 10 movies of 2018. They talk about some of the recent trends in the the film industry and which movies the public came out in droves to see.

#287 — That time of year when reporters count backwards

#339 Rebuilding trust by peeling back the curtain in newsrooms

News readers and viewers are no longer disconnected by time or distance from those who provide them with information.

They also don’t trust reporters anywhere near as much as they did in the 1970s, and the availability of news 24 hours a day on TV and online is not helping matters much.

“How often do you hear (newscasters) say this is why we chose to cover a story?” asked Lynn Walsh of Trusting News, a media literacy and education program for journalists funded by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund in partnership with the American Press Institute. “You don’t hear that. People make assumptions that a story is chosen because a parent company is connected to this hospital, or they think why do you cover certain crimes but not all of them? Explaining things can help decrease mistrust.”

Joy Mayer and Lynn Walsh of Trusting News

Walsh, a former president of the Society of Professional Journalists, and Joy Mayer have spent the past few years working on Trusting News, a project designed to help journalists and newsrooms understand why the public doesn’t believe in the news anymore – along with identifying why journalists should care and what they can do to right the ship.

“The project started because there seemed to be a growing understanding in the industry that something needed to be done about growing levels of mistrust in journalism and a misunderstanding of what journalism was,” Mayer said. “I wanted to demystify it. I wanted to understand it so we could address it. Ultimately, I wanted to help journalists figure out to what do about it.”

Without the ability to discern when a journalist has done their homework and due diligence on a story and selected the best details to include in coverage, or have an understanding of why one type of crime is covered and others aren’t, readers and viewers will jump to conclusions. Those conclusions are often misguided and unfounded, Walsh and Mayer said, but there’s much journalists can do to help shine a light on their work from the start.

“Most of those assumptions tend to be negative,” Walsh said of preconceived notions viewers and readers have about story selection and editorial policies. “When we have a conversation and explain to them how you do your job, you get rid of those negative perceptions and assumptions.”

Trust in journalism hit its high point in the years following the Watergate scandal, but has been in decline ever since, sped up with the availability of cable news, 24-hour reporting and social media, Mayer said.

“The decline has been faster and certainly now that there’s a public campaign waging war against facts and journalism, we’re in worse shape than we used to be,” she said.

Something as simple as explaining at the top of a story why it was chosen and given time could help give viewers insight on the editorial process and can help dispel any prejudicial concerns that a story was selected due to advertiser or parent company pressure, they said.

Joy Mayer and Lynn Walsh of Trusting News join It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell to explore why people don’t trust the news anymore, why journalists should care deeply about it and how newsrooms and reporters alike can take simple steps to demystify the news process.

#244 – Newsrooms need to build trust with their audiences

#338 How to bring diversity to your sports desk

In April, Greg Lee raised some eyebrows when he called out The Athletic for its new roster of sports reporters.

Lee, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, was getting phone calls and emails from members asking what was going on.

“They were showing pictures of the people they were hiring and it was white men, mostly,” said Lee, who got his start at the Times-Picayune as a sports writer when he was 19. “I took it upon myself to do a scientific survey. They had on their website their staff and photos of everyone, they always announced who they hired.”

When he collected sufficient information, Lee took to Twitter to call out the rapidly expanding subscription-based sports website for its lack of diversity. Lee had previously questioned The Athletic for its diversity (or lack thereof) when the publication posted its All American team a year prior, but didn’t receive a response.

This time, things were different.

A conversation started, and now Lee is the managing editor for The Athletic’s DC page, covering professional and college sports in both Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

His ties to NABJ and its partner organizations, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Association of Asian Journalists, among others, has made Lee a leader in urging the publications he’d worked for to consider diversity and to bring on minority and women journalists.

In many cases, it’s simply a matter of shining a light on an aspect of the hiring and recruitment process that editors and managers didn’t previously consider. During his time at the Boston Globe, he helped introduce his boss to several organizations and writers, and the Globe ended up with two African American women covering the Patriots, an Asian-American man covering the Boston Bruins and a woman covering the Boston Red Sox, among others. “For all our major beats, we had women and minorities covering the teams,” he said.

In addition to managing The Athletic’s team in D.C., Lee is an instructor with the Sports Journalism Institute, an intense three-week camp that brings together student journalists from around the country to teach them the fundamentals of covering sports for two weeks before spending their final week at a sports journalism conference.

Lee was a member of the institute’s second class at Kansas University and recalls getting up at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. to spend a few hours reading newspapers and taking quizzes before going to Royals games and learning how to cover a professional team in real time.

“This is like my boyhood dream,” Lee said.

Greg Lee, managing editor for The Athletic‘s Washington, D.C. edition, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss how a lifelong love of sports and a dedication to diversity led him to fulfilling a dream he didn’t even know was a possibility.

#295 — Putting sports second, athletes first

It’s All Journalism – Year in Review

Each December, the It’s All Journalism crew likes to look back at all the conversations we had over the past year. On this week’s podcast, Producers Nicole Ogrysko, Amber Healy, Amelia Brust and Michael O’Connell discuss their favorite podcast episodes of 2018 and what topics they’d like to cover in the new year.

We also looked back at the most downloaded episodes of 2018. Below you’ll find the 10 episodes produced in 2018 that our listeners downloaded the most. Do these match your favorite episodes of 2018? If not, why not take our anonymous online survey to let us know what episode was your favorite.

Top 10 podcast episodes of the year

#290 — What’s it like to report from North Korea?

#291 — Ear Hustle’s remarkable success in podcasting from prison

#296 — Cinematic video journalism shakes up old model of visual storytelling

#293 — Need new skills? ONA is here to help

#300 — The who, what and where of podcasting

#299 — Can journalism survive in a post-truth world?

#288 – Telling stories of the past to change the world’s future

#298 — Investigative journalism helps restore lives robbed by injustice

#297 — Learning, relearning and unlearning the magic of broadcast

#287 — That time of year when reporters count backwards

#337 Facebook shakes up how media pros interact with their audience

Facebook made a much publicized change to its algorithm early in 2018 that had a dramatic impact on what content users saw on their feeds. The move was made ostensively to weed out bogus news sites and bots spreading deceptive information. Greater emphasis was given to acquaintances and pages with which users frequently interacted.

“I think what happened is Facebook realized that there are a lot of people that didn’t necessarily believe in Facebook anymore and they’re a business and there’s a lot of businesses who are on there and use their advertising,” said Jayna Wilcox, senior digital sales strategist for 2060 Digital, the marketing arm of Hubbard Radio.

Part of Wilcox’s job is to engage with Hubbard’s audience through social media, both in online posts and advertising. According to her, Facebook’s changes had a big impact on how advertisers and news outlets used the platform.

“We have definitely, from an advertiser perspective, seen many things happen such as some of the targeting tools taken away,” she said. “There’s a lot more where you have to be authorized in many cases, depending on your industry or what type of ads you’re doing, especially political. So it’s really just cracked down on it and in an attempt to gain back the trust of a lot of its advertisers and the audiences.”

Despite the hurdles Facebook has thrown in front of media outlets, newsrooms and their marketing departments can still follow a few best practices to help improve performance.

“Number one, looking at it from an organic standpoint, make sure your page is optimized,” Wilcox said. “It’s as simple as updating information in your about section, which links right up to SEO [search engine optimization]. It’s as simple as making sure you are verified. Head into your settings and get that page verified so that you are keeping a consistent brand, whether that be throughout your website, your Facebook presence, your Instagram presence. So little things like that right off the bat are very important.”

Another not so obvious fix is varying the type of posts you add to your Facebook feed — and stop using stock photos, for chrissakes.

“Think about the type of content from a creative standpoint,” Wilcox said. “If you’re using a bunch of stock photos after stock photos, at some point the audience is gonna realize that that doesn’t feel organic and they want to feel like there’s a real person behind the message. So even something as simple to us going live on Facebook, seeing a face, a real person, you know, having that combination and variety of content will also help in that. Just from an organic standpoint.”

On this week’s It’s All Journalism podcast, producer Michael O’Connell talks to Jayna Wilcox, senior digital sales strategist for 2060 Digital, about how newsrooms and their marketing departments can improve their audience engagement on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

#336 Data Viz Today follows audio path to visual subject

When was the last time you looked closely and attentively at a map and thought of it as an example of data visualization?

A love of maps and all the information they convey provided a new career for Alli Torban, a data visualization designer at the American Enterprise Institute and Data Viz Today.

“I came at data visualization how most people come at data visualization, which is in a very roundabout way,” Torban said. She has a degree in math and moved to the Northern Virginia area to pursue a career working fora government contractor but put her career on the back burner when she had her first child.

She stopped working entirely after her second child was bor but when she decided she wanted to rejoin the work force, Torban didn’t want to go back to what she was doing before.

“I kept coming back to my love of maps,” she said. “I didn’t feel all that fulfilled doing software testing. … I discovered, well, I like maps, and that’s data visualization. There’s a lot of layering of data on maps. I started getting into data journalism.”

But without any formal journalism or data visualization training, Torban had to find a way to learn what she needed to learn while raising her children.

Here she took another unconventional turn: Torban began reaching out to the creators of data visualization pieces she saw and enjoyed and asked them questions about how they developed their pieces.

“I’d contact the author and ask a few questions, like what data they used, how they cleaned it, what their creative process looked like.They would tell me the information,” she said. “I compile that information into a story so I can tell my audience, bring them through the process.”

But why not take a visual concept and relay it on a visual media, like YouTube?

“I have heard that a lot,” Torban laughed. “I love listening to podcasts. I don’t have a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. I’m constantly cleaning up, getting snacks, making dinner. There are lots of things you’re doing when you’re busy following around little people who need a lot of attention. Listening to podcasts were my outlet, so I’m really sticking to podcasts for selfish reasons.”

Alli Torban , a data visualization designer and host of the Data Viz Today podcast, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain how her love of maps changed her career and why podcasts made more sense than YouTube for exploring a very visual concept.

#183 – Data journalism by the numbers

It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.