Gotta love what you do

This was my Friday. This was my Saturday.

It was a long weekend of work. I did eight game stories on basketball and volleyball, trying to make each sound exciting and different then the rest although they all blurred together in my head.

In three of those, I had to provide commentary on the streaming webcast online. It was an on the spot offer: "I need you to commentate volleyball." It was a new challenge. I mean, I don't really know volleyball. But it was a fun, spontaneous experience.

Commentary, run down, get quotes, write story, send, run up, commentary, repeat.

At the end of each day, I felt exhausted. I also found out I love what I do.

Anytime I feel like complaining about working any of my numerous jobs over the past year, I stop myself and realize how dumb that would sound. I am being paid to write, watch, and talk about sports.

If you would have told me two years ago when I was spinning my wheels in university, trying to get somewhere I didn't know how to get to, that this is what I would be doing, I would not have believed you.

I am thankful for all the opportunities that have been given to me throughout my schooling and I look forward to many more.

Because I like what I do.

Which is good because this will again be my Friday and my Saturday once again in the not-so distant future.

Not Incognito

Surfing through the rounds of NFL pregame shows yesterday morning, I landed upon FOX where the station had landed an exclusive interview with suspended Miami Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito.

Incognito has been suspended by the team while the league investigates claims that he bullied fellow offensive lineman Jonathan Martin to the point where Martin snapped and left the team. Evidence of texts and voicemails from Incognito to Martin have surfaced and the ensuing news story has gotten plenty of hot takes (ugh) from the sports world.

Incognito had not spoken publicly on the events since his suspension. He sat down with Jay Glazer yesterday for an interview.

The heavily edited, six minute interview featured Glazer asking predictable questions for rehearsed answers from Incognito. Disclosed beforehand was Glazer's relationship with Incognito. It raises a few question. How am I as a viewer suppose to know that Glazer handed this interview objectively? Why is FOX OK with a reporter holding this kind of a relationship with someone he's reporting on?

Today, there has been backlash stemming from the interview. The Atlantic Wire says that though the network disclosed the relationship between the two "...that should not excuse the player or journalist. In a lot of newsrooms, Glazer would have been disqualified from ever speaking with Incognito on camera."

Meanwhile, Dave Zirin from The Nation took the interview behind the woodshed. In his column, Zirin called the interview "sports journalism at its worst" and a "big steaming pile of propaganda". I would encourage you to read Zirin's piece since it sums up my thoughts on this issue in a much more colorful and articulate manner.

Winnipeg's Great War

During World War I, 261 Fort Street was home to a major milestone for the city of Winnipeg.

It was home to a factory owned by John Hadden, who by receiving an order for 6,000 tunics and pants, was the first Winnipeg-based firm to win a war-time contract.

To the right is 261 Fort Street today. 

Not a trace of that history remains on that site to the eye.

Winnipeg's Great War: A City Comes to Age touches on many historical themes in the book. One that is weaved throughout is the evolution of Winnipeg through the war. The Winnipeg that existed before World War I was completely changed by the end of the conflict.

261 Fort Street is an example of how that change continues today.

The book, written and researched by Jim Blanchard, is packed full of interesting facts, details, and anecdotes about Winnipeg during the First World War. Blanchard said the book took him three years start to finish and it shows in the detailed text.

One of the strengths of this book was Blanchard's ability to recreate event as if he was a bystander. Whether it was a riot or the torture of conscientious objectors, Blanchard does an amazing job in taking accounts from a variety of sources and describing the events as if they were happening right in front of his face.

The amount of detail in every paragraph did make it a harder read at points, especially with chapters that reached at times 70 pages. With no natural breaks, the information bogged me down at times and I felt like I wasn't completely digesting the entire story at times due to the length. However, that would be my small criticism of this otherwise terrific book.

Having an opportunity to talk with Blanchard today was very insightful in seeing what methods he used to research and write this work. As someone who someday wishes to write a historically-based work, I enjoyed listening to him speak about how he went about finding and tackling the information he needed to write the book.

Evidence, Evidence, Evidence

Last week, I had the pleasure of listening to Trudy Lieberman speak about medical journalism during a presentation at Red River College that was put on by the Evidence Network.

 
She touched on many issues surrounding the coverage of ObamaCare, how to deal with PR people, and properly vetting “experts”. But everything she said followed the same message: the evidence doesn’t lie.

Lieberman, who works as a critic for the Columbia Journalism Review, used several real-life examples to illustrate her points. She also held an hour long Q&A session that was both interesting and informative. One of the greatest parts of the program I’m taking is the fact I get opportunities to not only listen to people like Lieberman but talk with them afterwards and ask questions. 

During the Q&A session, she said that anecdotes are a staple of reporting. And they shouldn’t. The problem with them is how do you know they are true? Is it based off experience, third-hand information, or a real life example? There is no way of truly knowing how factually correct they are.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity ran a segment on his show this month ripping ObamaCare using personal anecdotes. Salon ran a fact check on the stories told and at the very least, the segment is misleading. A paragraph in the story by Eric Stern speaks directly to what Lieberman talked to us about: 

“...will we truly have the same freedom to choose a physician that we have now? Will a surplus of insured patients require a scaling back (or “rationing,” as some call it) of provided healthcare services?  Will doctors be able to spend as much time with patients? These are all valid, unanswered questions. The problem is that people like Sean Hannity have decided to answer them now, without evidence. Or worse, with fake evidence."

Balance that with another story from Reuters about ObamaCare that uses evidence through out. By using facts that can be checked and confirmed by anyone, the story has to be given more validity over ones that don’t use evidence. 

You can agree, disagree, like, or dislike a story for a number of reasons. But by using evidence and the cold hard facts, there is one thing someone can’t call your story: untruthful.

The evidence is there.

It's been busy

Here I am, once again, trying to blog in early hours of Tuesday morning. The past week has been really busy for me both in school and with other jobs I have taken up during the school year. The one nice part of this program is when I do something, there is a product to show at the end. I thought I would use this post to highlight a few of the things I've been doing in the last week.

1) One of my favorite opportunities through school came up last year when I got an opportunity to work with the Manitoba Bisons sport teams. I was doing that again this weekend with a pair of game stories on women's soccer, which I know next to nothing about. However, their coach came up to me afterward the game on Saturday and said she really enjoyed my write-up, so I must have done something write.

2) Not that I didn't have before, but I do have a new respect for people who can do multi-hour talk shows. I host the Manitoba Sport Report for my IPP on Red River Radio and I find the preparation and actual show is fun and exhausting. I can't imagine doing it for a three hour show. Here's the website with archived episodes. Only the first one is up but there was a show last night which will be posted very soon.

3) Although this has caused some former hockey playing friends back in Brandon to disown me, I have started working as the media person for Winnipeg AAA Hockey. That requires finding time in my already hectic schedule to go to a game each week, write about, and take pictures. Here's my first one from last week on the homepage of the Winnipeg AAA site.

I also have many other cool projects on the go. Everything I'm doing causes me to be extremely busy but the experience all of the things above offer me is fantastic and I'm glad I'm doing them.

Things got real in Mount Kisco

Last week I posted about Target Practice, one of two documentaries shown last week at Cinematheque. The other, The Trib: Story of an Underdog Newspaper, was a great look at the newspaper business in Winnipeg in the 1970s. Among the stories told were ones about the rivalry between the Winnipeg Free Press and Winnipeg Tribune.

1970s Winnipeg has nothing on 2013 Mount Kisco, New York.

Mount Kisco is a town of over 10,000 located in southern New York. It was a village as of 1978 and is the home of two newspapers, the Hudson Valley Reporter and The Examiner.

The rivalry between the two has escalated to the point of an arrest.

The publisher of The Examiner suspected the Hudson Valley Reporter was removing their papers outside of a diner in Mount Kisco and replacing them with ones of their own. The Examiner went so far as to hiring a private investigator to look into the manner. It worked; they caught an employee of the Hudson Valley Reporter in the act.

Later, Michael Espinoza was arrested and charged with criminal tampering.

The whole story is here, is pretty funny, and shows you the lengths people will go to outsell a competitor.

What day was Target Practice?

On Thursday, our journalism class checked out a series of shorts at Cinematheque. We were most interested in a documentary directed by Paula Kelly called The Trib: Story of an Underdog Newspaper. It was paired with a dramatic piece by John Kozak called Target Practice, where one scene in particular caught my attention.

Without giving away spoilers, the scene has two people talking at the doorway with a baseball game playing in the background. Me being me, I immediately began paying attention to the game in the background. While dialogue made it hard to hear it in its entirety, I took away what I could and decided I would figure out the day of the events in the movie based on the game that was playing.

Here are the four key details:
- Mark Trumbo (Angels) was batting and had already struckout twice in the game
- Trumbo was batting against Phil Coke (either Tigers or Yankees)
- The score of the game was 1-1 at that point.
- The Angels scored a run on a sacrifice fly towards the end of the scene.

I started by going to Phil Coke's Baseball Reference page. Since I didn't know what team he played on but Trumbo's, I searched Coke's game-by-game results for games against the Angels since 2009 (when Trumbo broke into the league). I find out Coke didn't face Trumbo once in 2009, narrowing down his team to the Tigers since he was traded there before the 2010 season.

In 2010, Cokes faces the Angels three times, but not once was Trumbo in the lineup. On July 4, 2011, Trumbo and Coke finally face off when the Angels first baseman singles off the pitcher. However, this is not my game since the score was never 1-1 and Trumbo did not strike out in the game. Their next meeting is on July 28 but the details of that game does not match either.

The next matchup is July 30, 2011. Trumbo strikes out swinging in the top of the second and does so again to end the fourth (!). In the top of the sixth, with the score 1-1 (!!), Trumbo steps up for a third time, this time versus Phil Coke. He is walked and a few batters later, the Angels score on sacrifice fly (!!!).

This is the game.

Not another game matches the details provided in the movie and it also fits with other minor details said in the movie (Erick Aybar is playing was one).

I can say conclusively from my research that the events in the movie Target Practice take place on July 30, 2011.

****

"There's a dirty little secret about the politics of negativity and division: unfortunately, they work," said Trudeau. "Mr. Harper has proven that you can get elected with a majority that way. He's also proven that once you get elected that way, you can't govern worth a damn."

That is a quote in a story I did as an assignment about Justin Trudeau's speaking appearance in Lorette, MB last Wednesday. As I always do when writing a story, I consult the Canadian Press Style Book when I'm not sure on something.

This time, I wanted to make sure I could quote Trudeau saying "damn".

After reviewing the section on obscenities, there are times when using such language is allowed, including when "A prominent figure cursing in public..." I was good to proceed.

But after thinking on it for a day, I wondered: is "damn" even an obscenity?

This time, the Canadian Press Style Book had no answers. There was no list of words that were deemed unacceptable to print.

On an online forum, a few posters had a debate about what's ok to print and what's not ok. A poster named Greg Rasa, who appears to be affiliated with a daily newspaper in the northwest United States, had this to say regarding the quote from George W. Bush in 2000 when he called New York Times reporter Adam Clymer a "major-league asshole":

"When it happened, back in the 2000 campaign, few papers printed it. We didn't. But after immersing myself in the Nexis search and seeing all of the dubious and lesser instances of that word being printed, I'm now certain that if it came out of the president's mouth today, we'd print it."

 The discussion brings up two good questions. Are the standards for printing certain words changing? And should there be different standards for online and print media?

Embracing Multimedia

Today, along with my fellow journalism majors, submitted a story to the Community News Commons (check it out why don't you).

There was a catch to this assignment however: we all had to incorporate at least two types of media into our story: print, audio, video, and/or pictures.

I had never done this before. All of my work previous to this had been 100% written words. In publications, it would be accompanied by a photograph taken by someone else but never before have I had to merge two styles of media into one story.

And I think it turned out pretty well.

With wrestling going through a whirlwind of being out and then back in the Olympics Games in a seven-month span this year, I pitched to interview local wrestlers (not these guys, these ones) about their thoughts on what transpired.

I ended up having a terrific chat with Adrian Bruce, who is the head coach of the University of Winnipeg wrestling program and has been involved with the sport provincially and nationally. At one point, he gave me a terrific response to the rule changes wrestling has implemented after being dropped from the Games and which ultimately led to them regaining status as an Olympic sport.

There was one problem: I couldn't fit it in my story. To quote him would be too long in written format and for someone like me, who knows very little about wrestling, paraphrasing would not be a good idea. Much of what Bruce was trying to convey to me would literally be lost in translation.

However, publishing online gave me the option to include the audio clip of Bruce explaining important rule changes inside my article. If the reader wants to find out more, they now have the option of listening to a :90 clip from an expert rather then a jot-note paragraph written out by me. Having that option available allowed me to publish what I think is a better overall story.

To wrap up, if I ever come across an opportunity to use different types of media in a story going forward, I say yes every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I think it gives any story a more complete feel and does a better job at engaging readers.

Audible in the Media Room

Every time football overlaps with the purpose of this blog, which is to point out journalism-related topics, it will be covered here.

This week is no different, especially since two similar situations popped up. However, how the media handled the different situations starkly contrasted each other.

Both stories come courtesy of Awful Announcing.We will start in Columbia, S.C., where for a short time, South Carolina Gamecocks football head coach Steve Spurrier took control of the sports department at The State, a daily newspaper in Columbia.

The whole story is at here, but this is a quick summary. Spurrier and State columnist Ron Morris have had a long running feud. Suddenly this week, Morris was removed from the Gamecocks beat and told never to report on the team again.

His replacement? Glenn "Superfan" Snyder. And one of Snyder's resume references was none other then Spurrier, who Snyder described as a "friend". Here's a passage from the story by Jim Romensko:

Spurrier told me that he helped “Superfan” Snyder get his job at The State.

“I did call The State newspaper and put in a good word for him, and they hired him,” the coach said.

The link above from Awful Announcing had some good reaction tweets from the always fantastic Richard Deitsch and Andy Staples.

The newspaper later backtracked and released this memo, which is seen on Romensko's site with some added commentary. Morris is now allowed to write about the Gamecocks again but you can't say it was a strong week for journalism in South Carolina.

As Staples' tweet above says, the Gamecocks have the right to complain if they don't like the coverage they're receiving. But for a newspaper to allow the program to have any influence on how they report and who reports it is so, so wrong on so many levels. It just goes to show how big of a stick college football swings in the south.

Well...not quite. After Southern University was upset with the coverage from The Advocate in Baton Rogue, the football program decided to limit access to its players for the newspaper. How did The Advocate respond? By dailing back coverage of their own.

The relationship between sports teams and the media that covers them is interesting. Some athletes and coaches loathe to give up time for the media because it takes time away from what they would rather be doing. And because sports reporting is becoming more and more agenda-driven, the words of those athletes and coaches are wrangled into whatever the reporter is trying to drum up that day.

However, beat reporters and observers are how fans are able to stay in day-to-day contact with the team. Sports teams and the media need to be respectful of each others jobs. In this case, both football programs have to realize the newspapers need to report fairly because it's their jobs, even if it wasn't favorably for them.

The Washington What?

Tonight, in a game with massive fantasy football implications for me, the Philadelphia Eagles travel to Washington, D.C. to take on the...uhh...hmm...

No, I didn’t forget the name of the team. I’m just deciding whether or not I want to say the word “Redskins”. Well, never mind I just said it.

Over the past year, the nickname of the Washington team has gotten an increasing amount of attention. Whether you find the name offensive or think the team should adopt a new moniker is not the question being asked here (although a recent poll found a response of yes and no to those questions respectively).

Lately, the question for media members is how you address the team. Do you say “Redskins” in your story and risk making a slur to members of your audience? Or do you try to stay out of the debate and report on the Washington Redskins as the organization is properly named?

For many years, everyone answered yes to the second question. However, more and more journalists are opting not to mention the nickname any further. 

A few days ago, lofty football columnist Peter King announced he will no longer use the name on his new website. He joins a list of organizations like Slate, The Buffalo News, and the Philadelphia Daily News that will reword any mention of the Redskins.

Should media organizations be getting in the middle of this name debate? It has become a hot topic as of late and don’t expect it to go away anytime soon. Ownership in Washington has said it will never, NEVER change the name.

Data Journalism

The digital age has no doubt effected the ways people consume information. Online technology has shrunk the 24 hour news cycle to one of minutes, or sometimes seconds. People don't need the morning newspaper or wait for the 6 o'clock newscast to rehash a story or event they learned hours ago on Twitter.

Although this has led to races to get the story first and the issues that come with that, the traditional vessels of journalism still suffer by the instantaneous nature of the news cycle. Instead of battling with it, data journalist Peter Verweij says journalists should embrace this new age of information and use it to their advantages when crafting stories:

"According to Verweij, readers don’t want to read the same thing in print that they have seen online either on news platforms or social media. He says that journalism should be about producing news, not rehashing it. For the data journalist this is where data comes in. He argues that people want good quality reporting and analytical stories that inform them.

He says that this data is available and that all journalists need is to do is use the technologies that are available to them to understand that data and construct it into a story."

The Guardian have been one of the leaders in embracing data journalism and their website has a massive list of stories it has done with data research being a crutch of the story. Their data-driven story on the status of the Fukushima Japan nuclear reactors is the highest reacted to data journalism piece they have done, according to The Guardian.

Here in Canada, data journalism has been beneficial to at least one news organization. In 2010, Global created their own data journalism team. Since their inception, the team has won several media awards and wrote a great story on the structural damage to the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto.

While the team is small, Global believes that in the long run, the data journalism team could have a big payoff for the organization:

"At a time when newsrooms are laying off staff and mounting paywalls, Global has recently revamped its website and just finished a hiring spree for its online team. The data team is one of early investments Global News made digitally. While other investigative teams are more broad ranging in their mate, Global's data desk devotes its time entirely to filing FOI requests, analyzing the results of those data requests and writing specifically data-led stories. They also collaborate with the television side of Global News on merit."

If Global continues to have success with data-driven investigations, more news organizations could follow suit. This shows that while journalists might have to dig deeper, good stories still exist to be reported on.