 Hi this is Jessica Haigman at Alden Library and today we have a live video for you that is actually part of our research workshop series. We have three local reporters who are going to tell us about how they do research when they're doing reporting and kind of what it's like to be doing research and reporting in the age of faith makers. So I'm going to turn the camera out here so that we can introduce you to our speakers. How's it going? How's it going everybody? My name is Tyler Buchanan. I'm the editor of the Athens Messenger and also sister paper of Vinton County Courier. The courier is a weekly come out every Wednesday so that's today and the Athens Messenger obviously a daily six days a week and we had election night last night so didn't get too much sleep as I'm sure you guys didn't either but excited to talk about some journalism stuff and when they're talking I'm going to be sharing this Facebook live link out so if you see me on my phone I promise it's for good cause but go ahead. I'm Susan Tevin. I'm the news assignment editor for WOEB news but I do a whole lot of other things. I report. I do audio stories. We do audio, web and TV. We have a student run news program on public access called W, called NewsWatch. Wow. And I just do a lot of reporting. We have a group of four. We all try to pitch into a bunch of things. We all try to do it together so we run all the time. We don't have a publishing schedule so check us out at WOEB.org, Facebook, Twitter, all those good things. I'm Sarah Holly. I'm the managing editor of the Daily Sentinel newspaper in Megs County. We are a five day a week newspaper. Election night was also last night for us so very little sleep, busy day type stuff. We cover as managing editor I am also the main reporter for the county so I'm out at meetings, out at events, pretty much anything that goes on in the county as well as handling research, investigative journalism, anything like that. I did ask Susan before I scaled her the day after the election and she said it was okay. I did tell her we would be a little loopy right now. Usually the Wednesday after an election night is actually pretty like yeah that's a good so we just we pulled this together. Susan and I worked together to schedule it because of course there's been this growing kind of feeling of fake news and it's hard to tell it's real and true and we talked about that from a library perspective and we work with students a lot to find what they consider what's credible information but I think we don't ever hear that much about it from the perspective of people who are creating information so we really wanted a chance to kind of hear from people who would do that. So I guess first question I had was just like what does it look like to do training to be a journalist? Like what do you learn about research? Sure let's make you sum up the whole curriculum. I mean like what are the important things you learn about doing research for journalism? Go ahead. Well I was just gonna say Susan not only having gone through it herself she is in a good position at WUB to be able to train new journalists that are used so you'd be in a good position to answer this. Yeah well both of us went to OU graduated from the journalism school so we kind of had the same not the same but consistent training. A lot of the training is involved in things that you can't really control as far as news judgment and that kind of thing. It's when you're learning about writing and things that's the stuff you can control. It's not until you get into the actual news world that you learn. Okay this is the kind of thing that people want to hear about. This is the kind of thing that people think is a very sensitive topic that you should really news judgment sort of thing. So in school I would say we learned obviously writing diagramming sentences I even learned from Drew Everts if anybody remembers her. And just I remember going to city council meetings one of my classes was the one that I remember the most was going Dr. Tom Suttus actually going to city council meetings and learning you know how all that works and you're not necessarily knowing you know all the topics what's the most popular thing to talk about but how a government actually works and how to figure out how to write so that people can relate to that instead of just writing like I did cops and courts writing the legal jargon and all that stuff you that's the sort of stuff you have to learn how to write so that you can relate to a certain group and certain demographic. Yeah there's obviously a spectrum right on on college majors between ones that are more heavily focused to the classroom and ones that are more out and about and really hands on learning. I would think that journalism falls more on the latter side. Obviously it's a four-year degree you know it's it's a lot of training in the in the classroom like like Susan said of the generic stuff like learning grammar and things. Other other different tools and things that that you can learn different classrooms some journalism classes are really specialized and OU has like one for environmental and biology and stuff so how how do you report on an environmental story that might be different than how you would on say a political or like a crime story. So there's some specialized things that you can learn in a classroom for a journalism degree but for the most part I know OU does and I graduated from Bowling Green State University they do pretty much every journalism school will will mandate having some type of internship something that you can actually go out and and do it before you graduate you're going to be in a newsroom for a semester for a summer etc and do the job and and it's it's twofold one learning and two you really get a sense of if you actually enjoy it and like it a lot because there's a lot of people that will start out in journalism as an 18 year old or a freshman and you think oh I like CNN I like Anderson Cooper right and then you you go into a newsroom and that's hey call the call the sheriff because somebody just got arrested right or cover a duck rate an inflatable duck race or or going to going to a bank robbery or something and you know pretty quickly like okay yeah this is this is what I love this is what what I enjoy or or not hopefully you fall into the love category and obviously we three have but yeah I'd say that's really that's really the bulk of of the journalism training and obviously those student newspapers you can get kind of a real-life experience as you're doing it and I think part of what we're talking about is transition from what we learned I like to say that when I when we were in school they told us to specialize specialize specialize that was all that I ever heard was find something that you like and write about it all the time by the time I graduated they said do whatever you can to get a job but now we're learning you know we've got to do social media we have to do uh we have to do like oh you has a grid lab where you can do 360 video you can do animations you can do all these things w o u b we for election coverage we did facebook live cuts every so every they had a timed out for we would do a certain topic at a certain time all straight to facebook live and you know you got to do online you got to make sure everybody's coming to your web page and all that stuff that we didn't quite get to learn till after we see that that's kind of the interesting thing on our age group of journalism students that are that are coming up is I was a freshman 2009 when social media is just starting to turn the corner twitter and facebook and etc and a lot of that multimedia stuff is coming into play with not just the curriculum but in real life newsrooms like there'd always been a website from past 10 15 years before that but not it wasn't a huge integral part of a news organization and not to bore with my life story but I started out as a freshman as a as broadcast major radio broadcast I wanted to do that and I yeah for for like for like about six hours my freshman year I was a radio broadcast major and the first day I went in and saw the actual switchboard and everything I was like no not not for me at all I can't do the technical side at all so I so my easy thought was okay I'll do print journalism all I need is a pen and a paper right I was sorely mistaken you know it isn't too technical with facebook live or using a phone and multimedia and a recorder you know it's not it's not too technical but you know there's the multimedia side of of a print reporter now in 2017 that if you looked at the curriculum and you looked at how a journalist was trained in 1957 it just is totally different but that's that's the kind of beauty of the of the industry is that it's it's always shifting and changing so I know for me I started out with a focus in public relations and it was actually the news writing class where we got sent out in the field and had to sit in in court hearings that really kind of changed my mind on what I wanted to do I've spent a lot of time doing cops in court reporting that is definitely my favorite thing to do next to sports which is what I did my first two years out of school with sports reporting so I've done a little bit of it all but definitely the hands-on experience that you get through the journalism school is what prepares you so this makes I have a question about the like the specifics versus the general or something like you all have to write like you could be writing for anything especially a small town where you could be covering a jump race or you know and a bank robbery on the same day you know how do you like get a good grounding is it just experience thing or like what like what would happen if there was like some sort of environmental thing that came up and you need to know about the science of like this thing that was happening like how do you approach that part of the process like learning enough to do reporting without going down the rabbit hole like before your degree I find it's it's not playing dumb but people appreciate if you ask them questions like if you don't know something pretending like you know something isn't gonna make them respect you or anything so if you're at a scene and it's like like the fire we had in West Virginia I had no idea what air quality tests were what all that stuff was until I read about it so I would be the one saying can you explain what this means what air quality testing is what why we do it what are we looking for because that will make people say oh you just you want information that I actually can give you you don't want just the how is this happening why are we doing this and all the stuff so I it helps to just ask the questions that you think maybe are dumb questions but people want to know yeah there's there's obviously a best case scenario of you going into a situation and being an expert on on whatever it is but there's obviously an element of of curiosity and the personality people that go into this field I'm I don't think you'd find them any journalists that say I don't like to ask questions I don't like to learn new things and so on that point if you're not a science person I'm definitely not more the the writing and that side of the brain side but you know there's sort of an element of you're going into a story and you kind of know you sort of know what it is your need to know by the end you you know the question the needs answered you just I don't know the answer and so as you're learning it you translate from what they're teaching you to what you're teaching to the audience whether it's in print or broadcast or however you're getting that story out that can kind of be the fun interesting process of hey here's here's something I learned as a as a reporter let me report it out to you and you can learn too I think that's part of the personality of this yeah and the answer the question or the question you're asking may change you know like wait a second actually this is the important part never be afraid to ask questions there are no dumb questions that you can ask when you're trying to find out information about something and it helps to know your sources as well make the connection if you have a local environmental person make that connection before you need to use them for a story get to know the people that you're going to be working with or that you're going to need for sources and that way they'll trust you more and you'll trust them and it works out for the best oh yeah I have had plenty of times where they've called me and said I know that you're going to be asking about this and I know that you're you want to do this right so here's what you need to know here's what we're what the part that probably the public is not going to understand maybe as much as somebody in behind the scenes would there's very much a lot of relationship building yes people who are going to give you information what happens is that person's not there though like I'm just imagining like yeah I need to write this story about the thing and you know today I don't have a person who I can ask do you like turn to the internet then or like we call those Fridays yeah or day before holiday or anything like that lots of pleading looks at the desk no um yeah I'm just gonna say there's there's an element of creativity that comes in um you would prefer it not be so pigeonholed of this is the person to ask and if they're not available then I'm out of luck type of thing you know as for like could you use other types of sources with with like the internet and stuff and I think one of the questions we're going to get into later is how how this research process differs from the process of doing research papers so I just remember growing up and you talk about you need five different sources and three of them need to be print and two of them can be internet right those types of things um obviously we kind of prefer people sources because in the journalism field we just we like people I think people that read stories like to read about people and what they have to say um obviously there's documents and stuff that come into it with with crime reporting there's so much of of criminal paperwork and legal paperwork that just comes into it but yeah there's there's an element of creativity of can I find this source elsewhere or if I can't reach this person is there another person or you know you find a way a lot of your bigger agencies and organizations things like that'll have a backup person or someone that they defer to if they're not around so it's usually best just to go ahead and reach out to that person by email a lot of times there's an automatic reply I'll direct you to somebody else or phone calls things like that and they can point you in the right direction yeah that goes back to having your sources if your sources know oh I'm going to be gone this is the person you need to talk to that really helps sorry so I guess what's a good lead into the question of this so having done you know undergraduate academic research or what we know about how people do academic research so what for someone who doesn't know anything about what you do research aside from the people thing is there anything different that we should know about like a journalistic research process especially for those of us who work in academics like I do a lot of work with a lot of people who need the three sources and they need to be journal articles and you know we're not coming in to look at media primary sources yeah we're yeah so how is that different for you the library is always a great source I know I work a lot with our library in megs county as far as looking up historic information we just recently did a series of articles on one of our school districts turn 50 so I used the library for my source they had old yearbooks old newspapers things like that on microphone and so that that makes it really easy when they can help you you call the library and they say hey we have this that you could use and that helps it provides you with multiple sources that way in some in some circumstances in terms of the practice of it we actually were talking about this because I'm doing academic research for my grad program and working as a journalist it's I know I'm fine it's totally different because we were talking about how in journalism something happens you may not know the question that you want need to ask or the answers that you actually need going into it but when you're doing academic research a lot of times here's the question that I want to answer how do I find the answer to that question or not how do I find that that's not truly the answer but when you're in journalism it's you just go almost blind and say I need to find the information whatever the information is and do it that way so that's kind of how it's different yes so much of journalism is is reactionary it's just kind of the nature of the business as something happens and we're here to report on it there's other obviously types of stories of previewing things or we call them evergreen stories which are maybe not timely stories but a how is something affecting blank you know maybe something that's a little different news path than just a car ran into the building and now I need to find out what what happened type of thing so there's there's that part of it is how it differs is how you're going into the into the process of whatever research it is I think almost now skipping ahead to the end result I think has a has a difference too is in an academic paper you're you're almost writing so often I think Susan can attest to this on a really technical basis and you're trying to build all of these sources together and oftentimes dozens or or hundreds into a very exhaustive research report or whatever and you you got these building blocks right and you're you're creating this whole however 2050 hundred page report or whatever so much in journalism is about condensing down um you know we deal with I don't say short stories but stories of two to five hundred words oftentimes you might have a longer future story or maybe a longer dive they call it an online a long read is that the name of it like a long feature story like that so you might have you might have that but so oftentimes it's you've got a story of two or three or four sources maybe one or two if it's very good and you're condensing down and parsing down language so that an everyday reader can understand this that comes up so much in crime of there's so much technical language if you sat in on a courtroom story how do I write this so that it can be well understood whereas in a in a research paper you're writing for your phd professor et cetera you literally a certain people know what you're talking about yeah yeah I mean then that's what I found too um for academic research you're trying to make it's almost like working in law you're trying to make an argument and here's this proof that this argument should be a thing and in journalism it's I'm the journalism that I do and I think what the general philosophy is supposed to be for journalism is here's the facts that's it you decide what you interpret this you interpret this however you want to but I'm just giving you the facts that I got from these sources in the way that you can relate to it it's completely fact-based leave your opinion out of it so that's an editorial yeah that's the core of journalism yeah you might come into say an academic research with as you're saying a theory or something personal but it's not so much that you're deliberately inserting yourself into the knowledge and into the facts it's just you come in with an idea in journalism you're typically don't so right so um so how do you I mean I'm not sure anyone can ever remove themselves from the facts of the situation so I guess I come from a research from a perspective of like you're always part of that process like you can you're still part of this society you're part of this local community reflectivity yeah yes there we go thank you so like how what steps do you take to try to as remove yourself as much as possible and like and especially in a case where it's something that's local to you or something you care about like it just how do you try to manage that uh basically I've had this happen a lot and I remember Tyler was working on the we were working on the vinton county grocery store story uh which is still going on stay tuned um we were he was super excited he's they've all been waiting four years for this to happen and he was like bouncing up and down and all this stuff and I was thinking about that but it's I find what it's a story that either is personal experience or personal interest to me or something that I've been watching for a while like a long court case or something I go into it even more of I need to find more facts I need to find more things to write about instead of this is how I feel so because I'm so afraid of getting into I think the opinions and how I feel about things that I'm like no I just need to find more facts so people more people are interested in this uh but in a I guess a subtle way of here have this information get interested in this sort of thing and more factual information right I think the story is that you're close or two and have a personal investment in you'll invest more time and effort into researching and finding your information and things like that but it's always important that the general public never knows how you feel about it that your writing doesn't come across as I'm for this levy or I'm against this levy or I'm against this person that's on trial you have to just lay the facts out there dig into it get as much facts as you can but never let them know how you feel and then you really have to watch social media post right um social media can really give away your opinions very quickly and people are going to take what they want out of the opinions that out of the stories anyway that you're presenting this because you have a particular agenda anyway so yeah it's a kind of plus one what they're saying of just trying to channel possibly a passion if you want to use that word for a subject or just for general news and just overall I mean it's obvious that people that go into journalism and people that go into this type of field they obviously care about current events and care about the news so it wouldn't really make sense for someone in our position whether it's the lowest smallest circulation paper in in the country or in Anderson Cooper anywhere on that spectrum it wouldn't really make sense if they were totally detached from the news as far as having an interest in the news I'm not talking about you particularly want a levy to pass that's more specific just in general if you're a basketball reporter you probably like basketball I mean it just stands to reason so it so if you kind of frame it in that context like they said channeling your whatever your feelings about it into okay I want to really hone in on this subject or hone in on this issue we bring up the environmental thing again people that really love environment love environmental reporting and whether they believe or don't believe in climate change or a specific issue that they love to delve into it and obviously write about it so that's that's really the main thing I would say on a local personal level it's in it's difficult to entirely detect yourself emotionally to the the situation that's going on it kind of just depends on the seriousness of the situation if you're going out covering some local Christmas event you're hobnobbing with people it's it is what it is it's fine it's community reporting if it's if you're if you're reporting on a big levy or something like that or something that deals with the crime or the sheriff you probably shouldn't be buddy buddy with the with the sheriff you know it's there's a spectrum on like how rigorous you have to stick to like the the integrity thing I mean it's yeah I mean it's it's it's a weird balance because you have to you have to be able to be objective and be able to present the facts but also a community newspaper more than metropolitan newspaper more than you know washington post new york times need to be sort of chummy with the community because that's how you get the good stories that's how you get the people to actually read your newspapers is by going to events and by having an interest in the community that you're writing so it's sort of presenting the facts and saying this is all interesting and maybe you should look at it if you don't and also this is the community that I really like and I want to keep going so it's a weird balance yeah definitely I know this is real quick we can move on and I know it's not an apples to apples comparison but if you think about like a sports broadcast on tv you've got local announcers right for for most of the teams and it varies between whether they're they're pretty down the middle or people that you know the old white socks announcer if they hit a home run he just lost his mind right and it's whatever that's not hard hitting journalism thing I'm not saying it's great or bad either way but to the point of a community in this case listeners of a team caring that there are people that are reporting on a team care about that team that matters to people so yeah finding a way to be able to demonstrate your I guess level of interest and passion people without the end product being swayed that's a challenge but you find you find a way to do it I think as long as you're genuine people will understand that you have this job to do but you also have you also have their interests at heart right so do you feel like you've gotten a like an uptick and kind of push back against like the media is wrong the media is fake I could be like you're getting is it if you're getting is it getting harder to talk to people has anyone into that more of this like kind of cultural sense of the media is all local bias or whatever direction bias or you know like yeah have you encountered that kind of person when you're trying to talk to people yeah I mean not necessarily in person but you know when you're trying to read I think some of the local sources that we we know very well and work with on a regular basis will make some kind of a comment jokingly um something about you know the fake news or something like that and and we know that they're kidding and it's just it's just kind of you know it's out there on the national level at the local level we're still trying to get our local stories out keep it fact-based but at the same time it has to be brought up yeah it's interesting being an NPR affiliate to get both sides we're very much the even keel or we're very much the liberal not so but yeah I mean WEP has a thing is a is a local media outlet so we don't you know adhere to we have to do what NPR is doing right now um I noticed in the last election that you know we had a lot of people oddly we had a lot of people willing to talk about you know political things but we had a lot of people not willing to talk about things and we got into this interesting dilemma where we tried to cover as much as possible we tried to get republicans and democrats I mean as equally as you can not you're not going to get an equal amount of people at the same event as you usual so a lot of people on one side I'll say didn't really want to talk they they thought that they were going to be ostracized they thought their ideals were outside of the norm so naturally we got a lot of people on the other side that wanted to talk and said this is how the things should be and and then you get people calling and saying well why aren't you covering the other side and I was like well we're trying so I mean it's it's interesting to try to cover that and I would get people that were completely against reporters and completely against the media and it really came down to just keeping them and in this case this example that I'm thinking of keeping them on the phone and saying well I just I genuinely want to know what your interests are because in this area the problems are not is this person a white nationalist is this person a person that a wealthy person we don't have a lot of that going on we have is this person going to give me jobs is this person going to make manufacturing come back coal mining it's not all it mean you have to come down to the level where you are what where you're doing your reporting and say I understand that a lot of people are saying that we need jobs we need coal mining and then they start to say well yeah actually that's exactly what I want and that's what I think by the end of it I would get people that would say well I'm glad you called me and I appreciated this conversation so I mean it's just a matter like we're saying about community acting like you're interested in things and actually wanting to know what they want to say instead of assuming so a lot of points here on the first side of it we're kind of lucky in that on a local reporting basis and I speak generally here a lot of the stuff we report about is pretty non-partisan I mean that both in a literal sense with political party there are local offices that that are not partisan and in a broad sense when you write about poverty there's no like this side or that side it's we're trying to sell poverty generally speaking a lot of local issues and this this goes for anywhere whether you're in a red state or a blue state if you're a random reporter in the middle of Arizona and you're just reporting on the local basketball team and the local sheriff and the local whatever it's not about partisan whatever mostly because of on the scale that you're reporting on if you go on the the larger side and we're not all large newspapers but in situations that we have been in those higher arenas having covered for the messenger in the career went to a Trump rally last year in 2016 and suddenly I'm sitting next to a New York Times reporter and etc right and Trump does the normal thing in his in his rally where he stops and tells everybody to to turn around and go yell at the meteorite so there were times that that's probably one of the few times ever in my reporting career four or five plus years that I've just had somebody actively like just turn around give the middle finger for no reason like has never met us doesn't know us at all so that's just at the end of the spectrum it's a different context really but I don't I don't think there's that many times that a local newspaper should have to or will have to deal with a lot of people worrying about these large biases if they're if the paper's doing good and and the reporters are doing a decent job reporting on stuff no one's saying that there's much issue there yeah most of what you're getting is why didn't you cover that inflatable duck race or something that's really the there's it's not that often that I get a call saying the messenger's too liberal the messenger's too conservative with the local reporting it's sort of if anyone's complaining it's usually either like you took out this comic strip I love or or yeah why why did you know you you covered this event last year why didn't you coming in this year I will I will say one thing about just news literacy in general and I'm sure they have a lot to say about this too is the the complaints that I've gotten about either the messenger the courier being one side or another doesn't have to do with the local reporting but has to do with the other stuff that comes in the paper right so papers all across the country they run the local stuff and they have wire services associated press tribune etc that that they run with and this goes for new stories in the middle of the paper or it goes in the opinion pages that they're say we we run an op-ed of the Pittsburgh paper and the Dallas paper about anything politics environment sports we it's it's the gamma right it's half like we just want nice quality coverage of throughout the country and to be honest it's kind of page filler and so we've run a lot of columns about Donald Trump this might be news to people out there but he's rather controversial and people like to write about him also he's the president um and and just another thing it's if you're an opinion writer um which I do a lot of columns as well as just normal fact-based reporting as an editor it's really really easy to write about things you don't like if you've ever listened to a sports radio broadcast or listen to any sports talk or or sports columns or stuff people will go crazy on the stuff that they don't like about you gotta fire the coach and whatever and same goes with politics it's really easy to write about I don't like what Trump said or did about blank than this to write a column about I really thought that tax policy was great it's really hard to kind of do that so so the long perhaps that's something we need to improve the yeah it's it's it's very possible so the long story short is that we've run columns and political cartoons political cartoons nail both parties don't get yourself when it was Obama in office when it was Clinton office they had plenty on that side but we've so we've gotten calls that said the messenger is biased against Trump so what do they mean there do they mean that columnist from Pittsburgh doesn't like Trump or do they think that by virtue of the messenger printing that column that we therefore endorse everything that's in the paper and a lot of times people can't differentiate between something that's printed in it and the publication itself so that's been kind of an interesting the last year or so um on the news literacy side is them understanding this gets back to sources and who's saying what is is people I've gotten more than one call it says I'm canceling my subscription because you wrote about Trump too much and that's another situation where you have to have a conversation with people and say okay why is this actually the case and then explain it to them and does that help oh I mean not to get into personal conversations but you know I've tried to explain to people like here we have this wire service and we pull things in I don't speak down to them it's just people don't people don't know the technical side of newspapers and that's fine that's fine um and that's great that people have questions but you know I try to explain them we pull things in just the same we pull in Garfield the same type of people that write and print the comic Garfield is saying people that write a column in Tucson and we pull it from them and people have a hard time understanding that just because we print something doesn't mean we necessarily agree with it and it might not necessarily be us it might be a Pittsburgh guy but it's that's been a challenge but we have lots of discussions at W.A.B. about that we don't print but we have social media and you know when a national thing happens when a like tax reform is being discussed we retweet NPR we retweet the Washington Post whoever we retweet um we have discussions about whether this looks like we're on one side of an issue or another side of an issue we have a lot of discussions about how often should we be posting these national things because we are a local station and we need to be focused on local and how can we localize this instead of just sharing it so when we have national stuff on our social media it's because we want to get something out first and then we will go back and say okay how how does this affect us locally how can we make this more relatable for the people that live down here so I agree uh I guess that makes me think of the difference between like I think it's like social media is just such a one point in time like I may see that national story but I don't see your follow-up maybe about how this affects people in Ohio so um I guess that's more a statement but for there's something for discussion the idea that um like you're talking to people about this one thing that you published and does that mean we're biased like are you trying to ever go back and try to look at like an academic would go and look at all your paper or they do a content analysis or random sample we don't have time for that but I'm guessing that's not hard to know well so so lucky for this conversation I after I got a couple of those Trump calls I actually did that I wrote a column about the process of me looking back into this and hearing about it and I don't have the numbers in front of me but the gist was I did like a 30 day sample it's not a huge sample but it's you know it's 30 days of papers you get a good sense of what the opinion page is like on a on a daily basis it was something like like if there was 30 or 40 columns plus political cartoons that related to Trump I tried to section them out into what you would call a negative column and you pretty much well know where the writer stands some that are negative some that are positive and there were some and some that are just neutral like like right as the hurricane hit uh in Puerto Rico there was a column like Trump Trump should have leadership and help out Puerto Rico it wasn't like a he hasn't been and should be it was totally neutral so there there are some columns that are like right in between so there was a split on all the three of those positive neutral negative obviously there was more negative than positive but it wasn't like it wasn't like 30 to 1 it was like 25 negative and like 10 positive and like 5 or 10 neutral so it was definitely one sided but down the middle but here's the thing are are people that pull these columns in they're just pulling from the whole syndicate and they're just kind of grabbing off the shelf right it's not a case of or specifically seeking out this or that so here so so as I conclude with my column you basically have two options if you're a news outlet like us with this question you can either a poll from the representative sample which Donald Trump right now is a 39 percent approval rating it stands to reason if you took a hundred columns 39 percent would be positive and 61 would be negative that's just kind of arithmetic right or you can selectively seek out an absolute 50 50 down the middle of positive and negative but could you I think if you looked hard enough you probably could I have no qualm that there's positive articles out there written every day from around the country of whatever wire service we're in but that was that was basically the I don't know if it's an ethical or moral question but just a just a strategy of how we deliver the the news and the wire service and and it's my thought that it's not honest to selectively edit and give a 50 50 to demonstrate throughout the country some people say this some people say that no if a hundred people are saying one thing and two people are saying the other I don't think it's honest to give a 50 50 but that's that's my approach as an editor you guys might disagree other editors around the country might disagree I think that's just our approach and it's it's been it's been hard for people to understand but I think generally most people get it and at the same time you're going to get it from both sides people you're covering you're covering I don't know you're covering Hillary too much or you're covering Donald Trump too much or whatever uh it's sort of a you just have to sort of roll with it almost you have to say okay we're going to get this from both sides we just have to decide is this in our judgment having done this for a few years um representative like he was saying is this something where we can say we have done both sides we have seen the usual side this has all been covered we're not overdoing one way or the other and I mean that's just sort of something with all the other things that everybody has to do during the day you have to decide what we're consuming we all have to decide what we're producing I know being in a more conservative county with mix county um last year I came over when Bill Clinton was in town and covered his speech here when he was campaigning um and we had some negative feedback you know why are you covering this Democrat um but then on the reverse side when President Trump was in Huntington earlier in the year we get some negative comments on why would you go cover that so it's I guess either way um news is news whether people feel like it it's relevant to them or their political affiliation a former president or a president being within an hour of you is still news just they're the fact that their presence is here right that itself is news yeah and we we were actually at WEB we're discussing how presumptuous it is of us to think everybody's going directly to our page where they're not just scrolling and seeing these stories okay are we showing the same story over and over again or do we need to show the story because we need to make sure people know we're paying attention it's an everyday battle yeah so there's the example I gave about the about the wire service and that's kind of not our direct news reporting but I'll give you an example of that kind of scenario in real life what we do so so on this subject of somebody somebody coming so we we had four years ago 20 was it 2014 that Ed Fitzgerald would be running against Kasek for for the governor Fitzgerald had an 88 county strategy in vinton county least populated county in Ohio he came two or three times which was kind of a surprise he came to the fair and I did a story walking around the fair with him and you kind of do that story where it's it's about the governor's race but it's also like a hey Ed Fitzgerald came to town type of story so governor Kasek for whatever for whatever you think of him he didn't he has not come to vinton county so the question is do I write a story about Ed Fitzgerald and that's the end of the story or do I write a and here's also John Kasek and I do a whole big thing on him that's a news judgment thing and you might have one reporter one editor that that writes the Ed Fitzgerald story where 200 words is about Ed's thing and then the other 200 are and here's what John Kasek has been doing in the governor's office blah blah blah or how I did which is you know explaining the race but the story is about Ed Fitzgerald because he came that's not a it's a question of how you view the news judgment yeah there's not a right or wrong answer it's just right different preferences I guess yeah and it's it's the same discussion we have with anyone we live I mean we both work where there's OU's campus so we have a lot of speakers that show up like I'm thinking of Milo what's his last name you know I can't think we had long discussions about whether we were going to cover that and it wasn't even a matter of what his stances were one way or the other it's this person is coming to speak to I think was the OU Republicans yeah somebody that was a specific group would we cover Joe Schmo that was coming for the same reason or are we covering this because people are telling us this is going to be a big thing and it ended up not being a big thing and we said no we wouldn't cover this if someone wants to since we are a student run newspaper and we pride ourselves on doing practical experience if they wanted to do it as a practice thing absolutely but nobody was available and we decided that that wasn't really thing that we needed to cover yeah for the for the context on that so this Milo he's a speaker he's not a candidate he's not there's not some type of race or some type of day after the election it's yeah it's a it's a private speaker that that came in and so that's yeah that's your that's your news judgment question now if he's a candidate of a local race or something it probably makes it a lot easier it's not just his bombast that makes you not want to cover and that's it's the he's bombastic and he's just a private speaker does that warrant the level of reporting and as you as people might have seen at the time of the five or ten outlets it includes student papers and the you know the alternative kind of outlets some did some didn't yeah we didn't the other paper didn't it's and that's okay that's it is okay to have these differences of a thing and that's why journalism is great is that it's not so black and white sometimes and it's the same with dealing with cases like sexual assault cases that are have sensitive means we had the chase bank sexual assault case that went through and it was covered all over social media absolutely we had a big long discussion about a certain particular sexual assault case that's still pending I guess recently and we talked about you know would you run this and we ran it they didn't for a while what were the what were the decisions that were made no one was charged does that matter Harvey Weinstein isn't charged do we want to go to that round you know it's actually I love having these discussions because it gets me to talk with other reporters and see what our peers are doing but also it's well where do I stay is this something where I have a personal bent on this and I think this needs to be covered so we need to cover however we can cover it or is this something that actually needs to be covered in us you do you do reporters sometimes have to check themselves and say no my boss actually says you're in your feelings you want to cover this because you're in your feelings and I have to say yes that's actually true and someone else should do someone else to do it or not do it I want to just add one last point to this and kick it to Sarah because I think she had something to say on this is you can take this this is what this is what I try to explain to people when when perhaps and again I think at a local level I don't think anybody thinks that WAB and the messengers both room with people and cigars are thinking how how can I use my bias for this political party or something to shake my reporting it it is so much of a very honest well-meaning people trying to report the news that the best that they feel that they can and it's conversations every day about every story and even stuff that's innocuous of okay we know we're going to do it how should we do it how how can we respect the people involved the best way or how can we serve the readers in the best way it's honest well-intentioned conversations that might lead to decisions that readers or people don't agree with but that ultimately come from a good place and that gets into the issues of trust and the community respecting the outlet and and things like that but it's not it's not a smoke-filled room not not at the local level at all I know we get calls in the office with people saying this is going on why haven't you reported on this somebody broke in my house why aren't you reporting on this and we do we run a weekly for the record with the sheriff's reports and things like that we do not list the name of a person unless they're charged and people do not understand that but until you're criminally charged in our opinion as a newspaper your name shouldn't be out there once you are charged indicted convicted yes your name is fair game right right and it would be public record on a police report if they're investigating someone too but say they investigate and they find out no this person didn't do it then we've put their name out there in connection with the burglary they may have had nothing to do with that but if if they are charged and and then indicted and go to trial or something like that and are found innocent we report on that as well so then we've reported that their name has been cleared but we don't want to put somebody out there that you know this person allegedly broken a house if they didn't have anything to do with it and I think there's gray areas I think if you get 10,000 different journalists in a room you're going to get 10,000 different answers this is this is this is the really the beauty of it and and why it's great but it's that people should understand is that just because one newspaper does it a certain way it doesn't necessarily make it the absolute only way or the best way that's just not to say that we don't have standards yeah so there's there's general practices um that hopefully most most outlets regardless of the type of medium whether it's print or broadcast or radio etc will follow but even those that there's there's places that will say no you can't name an underage person that's charged with a crime even if they're already charged with stuff some news people say no absolutely their underage can't do it I interned for a paper in northern Ohio that if a seven-year-old got arrested for a crime they'd name them so it so this gets back to the thing of when people say the media I don't know what they mean because because there's such a difference of of style and and approaches it is so different than oh then county courier is going to approach it so when there's there's talk of the media or of fake news I literally don't know what they mean because it's such a nebulous accusation that there's so many different types of media out there that that you can't classify what we do in local local newspapers local agencies and organizations are so different than what the national level does and while there is that universal standard that we follow decisions might be different at a local level than they would be on a national level so just what I would say to to bookend that point we get to another question to wrap up is is that take take these different outlets and take the different reporters and stuff at their own face value and look into what types of of standards and practices and experience and stories they've written and make your own call as a reader or a listener on on whether you value the work and the service they do or whether you don't but you can't look at it all in the same broad brush you can't you can't determine whether or not you respect the cnn the same way you would respect the Athens message you just can't and so different outlets are going to have different purposes and different different you know theories and ways and and and things that they report on we're local papers we concentrate on the local national concentrates on the national you just look at it each individually and make your own choices I guess from their associates consumer and I would say ask questions I mean we get calls all the time anyway might as well be someone saying hey if you genuinely want to know a good reporter will be able to say okay this is why I decided that this was an important story to do this is why I decided to do it this way they have time if they if you shoot them an email I would say any good reporter I would tell any student be willing to defend your work because you have to do this every day you have to face these things every day you have to know you have the fortitude to do that so can you guys think that's put you on the spot if can you think of a time that because happened to me that someone has called in with it with a question or let's say a complaint or something but they might have pretty good merit they might have been right or might have changed your mind about something it's it's happened to me yeah many times I've had that I mean not necessarily that I needed to print a correction or anything but that they said okay I can't think of anything specific at the moment but of course because I'm on the spot but you know I've had those calls all the time where you covered this this way but you don't even know this side of it and I said yeah I don't know that side because I didn't have anyone I didn't have access to anybody to tell me that side if you'd like to tell me that please I do that all the time I have an open policy as a journalist myself to say call me if you think something is weird if you think I've done something inaccurate let me know we'll talk about it maybe it's not inaccurate maybe it is if it's inaccurate by all means I will change it because I don't want to have a story hanging in the air this wrong but just come talk to me I mean people seem to think that there's this like bulletproof glass between the porter and the talker and you're like no I'm talk to you I just hope people don't get the sense even in the story I told earlier about someone complaining about the trump and wire thing you might have a person that calls in they might they might just not be accurate that that's fine but I hope I don't get the sense that there's any type of adversarial relationship between the media everybody just wants to be heard such as the media is to people between the readers they serve I absolutely love for the most part people calling in or writing in or emailing in it good or bad it's it's one of the best parts of the job it means you're reading every time I see one of those I put thanks for reading and then answer absolutely right whether it's negative or positive reader feedback is a great thing it makes you know that you're doing a job that people care about that they take the time to read what you're writing and they want to tell you that they hate it or they love it or they want to see more of this or that it just means they care right right it's nice to know that there are people reading it and not sometimes the negative feedback is the only thing you'll ever hear but it's it I always thought you get so much negative feedback if you get so much negative feedback that one person that says hey you're doing a great job you're like oh I'm hanging on but everybody gets that how how often does a random police officer a random McDonald's work or something gets somebody says you know what you cooked a really great hamburger or you handled that traffic stop right it's true nearly well it's everywhere it's everywhere so so I want to ask a specific question about coverage for more words I'm just letting you answer that like the comments after I think it was for you about not covering school board rates so which which school board I don't know while you were talking but don't get adversarial no I just I was just making sure and people are watching once again people are watching well I can say in defense of us I think we cover all you know the Athens messengers a county paper obviously Athens city I think it's the bulk of it just by population and things going on but we cover all five school boards and if you look in the messenger today there's coverage of all five school board race elections we generally try to go to as many meetings and and coverage as as we can we've pretty good relationships with all the superintendents um Trimble, Nelson York, Alex, Fedhawk, Athens we we cover them all so if they mean Athens um we've been at every meeting and every facilities thing that they've had I think Susan has too so almost I would I would wonder just what what the specificity of it was and I think that was part of why I brought up that were a four person newsroom at W.O.E.B because there's only four of us so as much as I would love sometimes to be uh to go to Nelsonville I covered when I was at the messenger I covered Trimble I think right before she came on you know um and that was really interesting I liked watching Trimble's I mean but you want to cover everything but you can't you're one person but hey you've got four Holly and I with her there I've got one I have I have a reporter one day a week helping me out now um we share her with a sister paper and I get her one day a week otherwise I am the full-time news person in Megs County so I turned it into a pity party so it does make it difficult to get to everything um and we do rely heavily on people um in those positions superintendents village clerks people like that to send us the minutes for meetings that we don't get to all right so we're approaching an hour um what do you all for your time I just want to I just want to end with one question just to kind of wrap it all up so I hear you um talking a lot about like you would like to respond to people um but it just seemed a little bit like it's on the reader to kind of investigate the transparency or to understand like to contact you or to know to look at like the whole scope of the outlets work to understand like you know I see one story and that just seems bad but is it really representative about their whole work so um do you feel like there's anything like the media as does it work could do to like promote transparency or um do you feel like we might be moving in that direction with more effort at like uh you know hear all the documents online that you can look at or um you know what can we do to increase trust and transparency without just putting it on the reader to contact individually that's a fantastic question and and the obvious example that just comes to my mind David Ferenhold with the Washington Post he he won a Pulitzer by basically he had a steno pad and for the entirety of the 2016 presidential election he he would have some type of uh story idea and he would basically have this list and he would put out on twitter he started with like 20 000 twitter followers by the end of the election he had like 250 000 or more right and he would say hey can people help me out with with blank um and and there was so much reader interaction and want to pull it sir with it but on a local level yeah I think that there's there's things that a paper can do or I say the word paper just because I'm in such a newspaper frame what I mean is local outlets um can do to solicit reader interaction um do you feel like you get more of that with social media definitely we certainly try um that is a never-ending process for us trying to figure out how to make that as engaging as possible we we at OUB we talk about that all the time how do we get more people engaged um like I remember specifically I asked because I was walking around the pop-off festival and people were talking about I I remember pop-off it tastes like vanilla custard or something somebody said something weird and somebody said it tasted like juicy fruit and everybody was like no of course it doesn't and so I was like I need to put that on facebook and we got a lot of engagement what does a pop-off taste like what does pop-off taste like and everybody has a different and everybody said I hate them and somebody said not enough to come to the pop-off I mean it you get so you hope to get that for everything for the court cases and for the things that you don't necessarily want to like have a big discussion about but it's difficult to figure out I mean that's something the newspapers and outlets have all been trying to figure out how to make for news I mean consumers and it's want to talk and we're just like please it's such a tough thing because we like you said we would love to have the type of balance where it's we're not a news outlets not on a higher plane or a lower plane for some things there's an unavoidable where we're here and we're saying hey public here's what you need to know I mean that that's just kind of the way and it doesn't mean to be broadcast out as a hey here's what we know here's what you should know right but yeah and you know they as much as we do are busy and don't have time to look at all the important things that they need to look at this kind of our this kind of our function is to facilitate the local flow of information to people I really think I've been doing a lot more Facebook live besides this and it really does seem to bring a lot of people out I don't get a lot of comments lately so please feel free to come but like if I go to local events like I went to the solar eclipse and you just say here I am the streets are completely blocked off because all the parking is gone and they're out of 3d glasses or eclipse glasses and then I did a video on showing them how you make a pinhole viewer and that got a lot of play so I think it's just you know saying hi hi we're here being being there yeah yeah hi we're genuine we're not just standing in a windowless room trying to type like he said smoke filled room trying to type and get people in trouble but at the same time you share what you think's going to be a really big story and you think it's going to have a lot of feedback and nobody will comment but then like we posted on our Facebook page for readers to submit trick-or-treat photos of their kids yeah and 200 photos that's right that's right but I can't get a comment on a story that's like a major court case something like that it is sometimes readers respond to different things and sometimes there's no way to predict what they're going to respond to we had a may still be a running joke and then messenger newsroom the apple yeah yeah yeah john hallie the photographer there took a picture of an apple posted it on facebook said this is a really nice apple what kind of apple I promise there's nothing more than that it was just a picture of an apple on a table this is a really good apple and I swear arguments for days there was probably there's probably something like five or six hundred comments which for a local newspaper is like unheard of um Joe Higgins who was the editor at the time was livid that this apple was getting more play I think I was doing a court trial at the time and nothing right which is that I mean it's just it's kind of part of the escape escapism that people want is like I don't want to read another court story right even though they are my heart and soul and I love court story I want to do you think people love the I know I want to talk about what time apple this is sometimes you just we want to look at videos yeah cat videos the tumbles the dog with no legs and the innovation center we just want to talk about that we don't want to talk about politics I understand it last point I'll make and then I'll promise what should I but it's uh that's the challenge right is is news again newspapers but but media outlets in general having that that back and forth and I think I would say in general newspapers are lagging on that because a lot of reasons but one for so long as we started the conversation with at the beginning of this video of we're generally taught in journalism training and just as a thing is keep yourself out of that right keep your own you know we mean biases generally but just you know as you a personal thing it's not about you it's about what you're writing about right so it's it's gonna be kind of hard to train newspaper reporters of all ages really I'm a younger one and I still feel like awkward when I have to insert myself into something to be on a chummy thing with readers because so often we're taught hey be the be the guy leaning against the back of the room at the meeting and shut up and listen you know what I mean so that's that's the one thing but you look at I'll watch WSAZ to watch Jeopardy and you can't go through a two-minute commercial break without I'm not complaining about two or three different ads that are WSAZ ads that are live at 10 tonight make sure you watch the whatever or or hey next Monday the dangers of seat belts are our scoop tonight right TV outlets do a particularly good job at self-promotion and previewing and teasing things that's that's the tonight at 10 type of thing and new newspapers were more focused on the work were more focused on the the reporting and and getting things out and we hope that it's a slow grind of process of after story after story daily newspaper after daily newspaper we're going to build that trust and by the end hopefully we've got you as a loyal reader and you'll want to comment you want to do all those things um that's the goal I don't know that a that it works every time but that's the goal I'd say yeah I mean and it's always the the struggle that I always have is wanting to do stories and in wanting to connect with the community but also not sounding inauthentic and that's not to say that I don't have interest in the stories like the solar eclipse up so excited about that but you don't want to sound like hey I'm just trying to like somebody's trying to be cool you know sitting on the back of a chair trying to sound like I know what you want is here and all the stuff you want to sound I'm giving you the information but I also want you to enjoy what you're reading and enjoy that this is being produced so sometimes it's a solar eclipse sometimes it's a facilities discussion right right board of trustees meeting and that's a good outlet I think would have a good mix between what you want to read and what need to read and that's the essence of everything in journalism is that balance between not being boring but not being vapid so yeah I think that's just a bit from us not being boring but not being vapid I don't think you're gonna sell too many things but I could be wrong all right well thank you all for taking time out of your busy post election super I guess and thank you for your your work and joining us and to anyone who came to watch this thank you so much if you have more questions I'm sure you could post them in the comments on the video and I'm sure our speakers will be delighted to respond back to you as they told us they they want you to talk to them so we'll give you our emails I'll give you her email