Robbery: Probs, Strugs, Fatals

Usually, every semester there are one or two practice stories where it seems like half the class goes off the rail, and goofs are as common as puke on the sidewalk the morning after St. Patrick's Day.

Lotsa struggles on this assignment. 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, and leaving premises suggested in ledes that are unexplained until well into the story.

A lack of attribution in paragraphs, leaving unclear where we got the information.

And yes, we had a few 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. Three people never turned in the assignment by the deadline. 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 translates to a 1,000-point scale to which your grade is converted to a smaller subset of points that add up toward that. 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.

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.

Beyond that, none of us can afford to miss a single assignment because we need the practice! You're already working on your first out-of-class story, and the best way to make sure you're writing it in a proper journalistic manner is to have opportunities with these practice stories to try our best, review our work, keep applying good habits and learn how to fix our bad ones.

We can't do that if we don't do that.


We spelled a name two different ways. In one robbery story, the last name of the clerk was alternately spelled Wiess and Weiss.

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 trusted spell check too much. In one quote, we said, "He ran right through the class." What we meant to say was, "He ran right through the glass."

And that's a fatal typo that spell check wouldn't have caught, because the incorrect spelling of glass created the correct spelling of an unintended and inaccurate word, in this case, class.

Please, remember that spell check is a supplement to -- but not a substitute for -- reading your story line-by-line and making sure you're saying what you intend to say.


Journalism isn't about writing; it's about getting it right, right?

For those keeping score, 11 of the 16 students in this class now have at least one fact fatal. If you include missed deadlines, there's only one person who has avoided totally tanking any one assignment.

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, we need to keep working to get better at this.It'll be awful if we failed to learn from fatals.