Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

I still haven’t seen the full Earth 2100 that ABC News broadcast this week. That’s the global climate change story told in the year 2100 through the eyes of a fictional woman born in 2009.

But I did view the online clips. What’s more I brought it up in my journalism ethics class. I asked two questions: Is it journalism when you quote a fictional source? And if it is, is it responsible journalism?

Students struggled with this. Some wondered if this was a creative way to push people to think of future consequences of present actions. Journalists are pretty good at covering disasters after they happen. Is this a way to cover them before they happen? Is that a good role for a journalist? Or is it mere informed speculation?

There was concern for whether this technique was pioneering an exciting new field of journalism or if it is a disastrous turn down the wrong path.

“Do you want to save journalism by completely blurring the line between what is real and what is entertainment?” asked one student.

Another thought the feature was creative, informative and worthwhile: “I just don’t think it’s journalism,” she said. “It reminds me of the Magic School Bus.”

Yet another said that the creative approach undermined credibility. This student thought charts and graphs like in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth represented a more effective journalism. Countered another: The use of the comic book character is “an awesome tool to reach an audience that has not grasped it yet.”

Some were uncomfortable with straying so far from the traditional technique of using sources to move the story. In traditional journalism, “you don’t say anything yourself. It’s always from the source. This story is about a girl who is a source, but she’s not real.”

Getting at greater truths has always been a hallmark of fine fiction. But is it journalism?

And should that matter?

By David Poulson

Perhaps in my quest for reader eyeballs and Web clicks I went a little overboard today.

As I mentioned, we’ve launched an experimental environmental news service. The Great Lakes Echo aggregates environmental news stories from our region and supplements them with original stories.

That content is provided largely by Knight Center students and another journalism project at MSU called Capital News Service. CNS covers the news coming out of Michigan’s state capital.

Perhaps someday we’ll raise enough money or partner with enough other journalism schools that we can feed the beast daily with quality original copy. Meanwhile, to extend our offerings we’re also souping up some glorified links to stories produced elsewhere.

Today we did that with a story that ran first in The Windsor (Ontario) Star. The story was about the growth of invasive species in the Great Lakes. It mentioned that the bloody red shrimp is the latest of these critters that cause all kinds of ecological havoc. The story has a nice image and a villain with a colorful name. Maybe our treatment drove some traffic toward the Windsor Star, giving that reporter greater justification for environmental stories.

I do a bit of social media marketing in hopes of driving some traffic our way. Today, my Facebook status read: Bloody Red Shrimp attack the Great Lakes. See Great Lakes Echo: http://tr.im/i2G

Carol Swinehart, who works at Michigan Sea Grant and does a lot of communication work regarding invasives, noted on my post: “You do know that we’ve been dealing with them for three years, right?”

I did. But making the attack sound imminent certainly sold the story better. And technically, it’s true. They attacked the Great Lakes three years ago and they still do. And how can you resist hyping something called the bloody red shrimp?

So I had my salesman’s hat on in this case. But was I misleading? Did I sow distrust of the media? Was I ethical?

What do you think?

Carol didn’t seem to mind. To my suggestion that Attack of the GIANT Bloody Red Shrimp would make a great movie title, she responded with “Co-starring Helga the Hydrilla, of course!”

Hydrilla is another Great Lakes invasive. Helga is a character Carol sometimes plays - in costume - as a creative way of communicating their threat.

I suggested that we had the beginnings of a great new monster partnership like Godzilla and Rodan and with a cliched tagline: They came from the deep!!!

Carol put a wet blanket on that one. “Well, hydrilla doesn’t go super deep…so far,” she said.

I hate it when the facts get in the way of a good headline.

By David Poulson

What has six legs and can hold up thousands of tons of concrete?

That’s what I wrote to a colleague this week. She was seeking examples of good ledes used in day-to-day beat reporting. And even though I wrote that one maybe 15 years ago, it still sort of makes me chuckle because of the sentence that followed. It went roughly like this:

It’s the Mitchell’s Satyr Butterfly, an endangered insect that’s delaying construction of a freeway motorists had hoped would ease their daily commute.

I like this lede because it breaks all of my rules. Normally I hate question ledes. They usually just sort of flop there in an irritatingly chatty kind of way:

Have you had your flu shot yet? No? Well, then trot down to the county clinic Tuesday where you can get one for free.

Yeccchh.

I also hate bad jokes. Well, actually I like bad jokes. I just hate them in news stories - especially the lede.

And yet, this one somehow works. How do I know? To start, I still remember it. Also, at the time I worked for a news service. A bunch of papers far from this entomological confrontation played the story big on their front pages. I’m pretty sure their readers could care less about the insect or about faraway commuters.

It was the lede that got me onto that prime real estate.

Journalism = Content + Engagement. Too often we give scant attention to the engagement part of that equation. But if you’ve created content that no one consumes, you haven’t committed journalism. With a messy beat like the environment, you’ve got to strive to engage readers.

And you have to carefully craft the attempt. An early version of that lede: What has six legs, can fly and can hold up thousands of tons of concrete? Read it aloud. The rhythm is all wrong. “Can fly” just throws it off.

But don’t let the crafting let you forget the content side of things. Britney Spears coverage aside, you really have to have something worth reporting to commit good journalism.

In fact, I also recall thinking that after the lede, I sort of blew the butterfly story. I set it up as a classic bug vs bulldozer piece. It could have been better framed as a broader issue of how habitat preservation policies could help avoid such spotted-owl type showdowns. Focusing on the destruction of a single species trivializes larger issues.

But even if I did successfully tackle the big picture, I still would have used that lede. In fact, I like it so much that I used it again in hopes of luring you to the end of this post.