Missing: Fatalspalooza 2013

Every semester, we have a practice story of two where it seems like the whole class goes off the fatal rail and plunges straight into It Sucks To Be Us Canyon. I'm sorry to say that the "missing" exercise was one of those for this class. Out of 16 people, we had 11 fatals.

Gulp. That's a lot for just one exercise, even for JRN 200.

Sadly but typically, many of the fataled exercised were well-written and organized, and many would have scored very well if not for the fatals.

But in journalism, it's not about writing; it's about getting it right. I'm afraid it's a lesson many of us are being reminded of the hard way today.  
 
In one case, we offered this quote:

"I met this guy who was moving to New York. He didn't want to take me, but I got him to change his mind," said Sabrina.

Problem is, this is what the quote actually was (italics mine):

"I met this guy who was moving to New York. He didn't want to take me, said I was too young, but I, uh, got him to change his mind," said Sabrina.

Yep, that's a fatal. We can use quote fragments but we can't change a quote or leave things out without letting readers know that.

There are several things we could have done. One is to use ellipses ... to let readers know a part of the quote is being skipped, and used words within parentheses (  ) to indicate words being added to replace similar words that are grammatically incompatible, like this: 


"I met this guy who was moving to New York. He didn't want to take me ... (but she) got him to change his mind," said Sabrina.

Or, we simply could have used quote fragments, like this:

"I met this guy who was moving to New York. He didn't want to take me," but she "got him to change his mind," said Sabrina.

In a second case, we did something similar. We wrote this:

"I hated my stepfather. He got drunk and hit my mom and expected us to wait on him like we were his slaves," she said. 

In fact, this was the quote (italics mine):

"I hated my stepfather. He's a jerk. He got drunk and hit my mom and expected us to wait on him like we were his slaves," she said. 

Again, if we didn't want to use the deleted section, all we needed to do was replace it with ellipses, like this:

"I hated my stepfather ... He got drunk and hit my mom and expected us to wait on him like we were his slaves," she said.


In third and fourth and fifth cases, we mixed up the stories of Sabrina Diaz and Jason Abare as being related, assuming Jason was Sabrina's step-dad. In fact, the two cases were totally separate, even though they were mushed in together in the info you were given.

This one surprised the hell out of me. I've done this exact exercise in every JRN 200 class I've taught over the past five years, and I've never seen this type of mistake made before in this exercise, using the exact same information. 

The proximity of information is not necessarily indicative of whether they are related to each other, Please make sure that before we write that we've gone over the information enough to fully understand it accurately.

In this case, there was one clear giveaway that the two cases were unrelated; Diaz now lives at 1987 Holcrofte Ave. with her mom. But Abare's wife, Anne, currently lives at 855 Tichnor Way.


Pre-understanding facts would have helped in a sixth case, too. In it, we said that 57.152 people went missing last year from East Lansing, Michigan. The information we were given was that 57,152 people went missing in your state, which in this case was Michigan. That is a misinterpretation of facts and is a fatal.

We had a second opportunity to catch this, too: a thorough fact-by-fact review of what we wrote, checked against what we had in the textbook, could have revealed the error and given us a chance to fix this. Please, let's make sure we're giving ourselves plenty of time to check our facts after we're done writing.

The same factors would have prevented a seventh case, when we wrote that 57,152 people were reported missing across the United States. In fact, that total was for Michigan alone. The national total, which we were provided, was 450,700. In the same story, we listed Sgt. Manuel Cortez as being with the Lansing Police Department. In fact, it was East Lansing.

And we did the same in an eighth case, erroneously associating Cortez with Lansing police when in fact he worked for East Lansing police.

In a ninth case, we listed Cortez as being with the Roseville Police Department. Where did that come from? We were told that the mentioned department was that of East Lansing. There was absolutely nothing given to us indicating Roseville anything. Let's please make sure we stick to the facts we have gathered, and not add assumed information.

In a tenth case, we identified Alan Christopher as a prof at Lansing Community College. For this exercise, the prof was from Michigan State University. We used incorrect information, either because we took down the wrong info or we failed to double-check our work against our notes when finished.

In an eleventh case, we quoted Sabrina as saying "I hate my stepfather." In fact, she said she "hated" (with a "d") the man.

And that's a fatal, too.

The first thing to note here is basic word-by-word double-checking of quotes for accuracy. Second, this is a reminder that spell check is a supplement to -- but not a substitute for -- that sort of detailed eye-balling of a story, since spell check wouldn't have caught the misspelling.

Why? Because "hate" was spelled right. The problem was, the intended word was "hated."

Is all this nit-picky? Some more than others. But that's journalism. Giving people accurate information that has been carefully vetted is what we do. Early in the semester, I called journalism a "discipline of verification." This is what I meant.

Learning to write isn't journalism. Learning to organize information isn't all of journalism. Putting in a system of checking facts before, during and after writing and organizing information is what makes this kind of writing and organizing known as journalism.

The good news is, up to now this class was doing much better than previous classes in avoiding fatals.

The bad news is, I think we've caught up to those previous classes now.

Still, while this is discouraging, let's not get discouraged. The whole point of these exercises -- and getting fatals, too -- is to learn by doing, reviewing what was done, learning what could be done better, and then applying those lessons the next time.

And that's what we're going to do here, by redoubling our efforts to carefully fact-check everything we write.