Usually, every semester there are one or two practice stories where it seems like half the class goes off the fatals rail, and fatals are as common as puke on the sidewalk the morning after St. Patrick's Day.
Lotsa struggles on these assignments, especially the robbery one. Unlike the last few assignments were most people scored 3.0 or above, on the robbery one many people scored 3.0 or below.
What were the problems?
Ledes that were unfocused or failed to go enough toward ultimate outcome and end result.
Nut grafs that were entirely missing, leaving out a critical bridge between the lede and the body of the story.
A lack of attribution in paragraphs, leaving unclear where we got the information.
And yes, we had a bunch of fatals. Let's look first at the fatals and why they happened, and try to learn from 'em so we don't repeat such mistakes in the future:
We missed our deadline. One robbery story that had a 9 a.m. deadline was turned in at 9:47:28 a.m. That's 7 minutes, 28 seconds late. And that's a 0.0.
A time fatal is the worst kind of fatal we can get in this class, because everything we do in here translated to a 100-point scale. So when we get a 4.0 you get 100 percent of points, a 3.9 gets us 99 points, a 3.8 gets 98, and so forth.
And under that scale, a fact fatal that gets us a 1.0 still gets us 70 points. If we screw up an assignment so bad that we get a 0.1, that's still 61 points.
But a 0.0 is zero points. At a 0.1, we're closer to a 4.0 than a 0.0.
And again, that's to emphasize that missing your deadline is simply not an option in the media biz. We always need to hit our deadlines. Every single time.
We misspelled a name. Three of the robbery fatals revolved around the misspelling of the gunman's
last name. It wasn't the common spelling of Weiss, it was Wiess.
Yet we used Weiss, even though what was given to us in your information was Wiess.
In general, first
we should have noticed the different spelling. Second, if we found
it odd, we should have double-checked with your sources to see if in
fact the name was spelled in an uncommon way.
But in this case, the latter wasn't necessary. remember at the end of class I told you that all information was correct, as presented and spelled?
We spelled a name two different ways. In one robbery story, the last name of the clerk was alternately spelled Layoux and Lyoux.
Obviously, one had to be wrong. A thorough check of your story copy would have uncovered the inconsistency. Let's make sure that after we're done writing, we give ourselves a good chunk of time to go over the story and check each fact for accuracy.
We misspelled titles. Such as in the murder story, where one of us spelled North Point Inn as North Pointe Inn, with an "e" at the end of Point. Again, there's no such thing as a small mistake; make sure you are checking your info both before you start writing and after you finish.
Journalism isn't about writing; it's about getting it right.
We got dates wrong. Three of us -- three! -- in the murder story reported the slaying took place today; in fact, the information we had was that it took place yesterday morning.
We mistook facts. One of us wrote in robbery that two other clerks who worked at O-Mart were previously shot. In fact, two clerks at another convenience store in the city were shot and killed.
A thorough reading and understanding of the subject matter before we started writing would have headed off this error. Let's make sure that before we start writing, we give ourselves a good chunk of time to go over notes and materials and make sure we understand each fact correctly.
For those keeping score, eight of 18 people in this class now have at least one fact fatal. If you include missed deadlines, you can add as many as four more people (pending any verifiable excuses) to the list.
Now, is that awful? No. Typically in this class we get a ton of fatals in the first half of the semester, before good habits start to kick in and fatals become much more rare in the second half. And this class sofar has fewer fatals overall than I would expect at this point from previous classes.
Still, it's not good. We need to get better at this, pronto.
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