DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS: KTVU incident exposes weaknesses in a newsroom's culture - and ours

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Airline mishaps are so rare these days that safety experts tell us it usually takes a unique combination of errors - not just a single random act - to bring down a plane.   When the book is closed on the embarrassing error by  KTVU, the Fox affiliate in Oakland, on the so-called crew names from Asiana Flight 214, chances are we'll see the same pattern.  It's likely that a cascade of errors will have led to that error as well. 

So, let's stop to consider some of the root causes of silly errors that are made in newsrooms.   In KTVU's case, there are four identifiable realities that converged, in this case, to wreak havoc.  And they are by no means unique to that station. 

KTVU accidentally repeated a lowbrow joke in reporting the fictionalized names of the crew in an Asiana Airlines flight that crash landed in San Francisco.

We have to begin with one of the dirty little secrets of the news business.  Gallows humor breeds in newsrooms.   I've never worked in one where it wasn't a fact of life.  Joking is one of the coping mechanisms that journalists develop after repeated exposure to death, violence, and mayhem.  Find a way to laugh about it - and the more politically incorrect, the faster it will spread.

The second factor is the need for speed, driven largely by the minute-to-minute nature of news updates on cable networks and the Internet.  Fact checking that used to be de rigeur before air time has suffered in the face of new competition.  

The old rule was to double-verify your information before you go to air - and always, always keeping a healthy skepticism about information from third party sources, even government agencies.   "Get it first, but first get it right" is a saying I learned at the Associated Press when I was still in college.  But the fact is that many of the lines of defense that ensured "getting it right" years ago are now gone, victims to cost cutting and relentless efficiency reforms.

The third factor is is another dirty little secret - the real life work that summer interns are often assigned to do real work, not just in newsrooms but also government agencies.   Interns in the news business are mostly unpaid.  But supposedly, they are there to watch and learn.   Handing them the keys to the car before they can drive is risky business. 

And lastly, there is societal change.  There was a time when dark puns stayed largely in their environs - in the city room of a newspaper, for instance, or on the floor of a stock exchange.  The Internet, of course, has changed all that, just as it drove the need for speed.  The more outrageous the humor, the better the chances it will go viral. 

If you are lucky, you will learn those four lessons at a small newspaper or radio station early in life.  The hope is that in a small market, public harm will be minimal, and you are early enough on your career path to have those inevitable learning experiences help nurture what I call a journalist's self-censoring mechanism. 

But when you move to the big leagues, you're supposed to leave the Little League behind.  You shouldn't make mistakes like that in San Francisco. 

WHEN CEO'S SCREW UP: Dealing with public embarrassment

"When executives are on the podium, it’s theater," writes veteran speechwriter and blogger Peter W Yaremko.   "It's his or her face that everybody’s watching. The last thing a speechwriter wants to do is cause embarrassment."

The fact is, a CEO who handles embarrassment poorly only compounds the original error.  Yaremko tells a couple of on-the-mark stories to drive the point home... including the recent White House incident in which President Obama strode confidently to the podium, only to find his remarks missing from the lectern. 

LINK TO COMMENTARY>> 

WHAT MARGARET THATCHER TAUGHT ME ABOUT NEWS

The question to ask about every story: what will it mean tomorrow?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Newspeople have the attention span of a gnat.  We are bred to cover today's big thing, get the facts, find the story line, write, print, and move on to tomorrow's big thing.  

"Yesterday's news," as the phrase once went, "is tomorrow's fish wrap."  Or as you might say today, with a roll of your eyes and a toss of your head, "that is soooo 15 minutes ago."  

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on an official visit to Washington shortly after her election in 1979.  ​

But news is also, as longtime Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once said, the first rough draft of history.  When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died at the age of 87, I was reminded again of the difference between a routine headline and a story that people would actually remember in 30 years.

In 1979, I was the newly-minted morning news editor of WOR, New York's proud establishment radio station.  In a time well before the Internet or even cable news, WOR was one of the most listened to stations in the country, and certainly among the most profitable.   

(I was in my early 20's at the time, and the next youngest newsroom employee was almost twice my age.)    

New York was a very different place in 1979.  The city had nearly gone bankrupt just a few years before, and was only now starting to recover.   Public services like street cleaning and garbage collection were notoriously undependable.  

On one side of WOR's 23rd floor studios at 1440 Broadway - where world figures routinely came to be interviewed -Times Square was dirty, sleazy, and dangerous.   On the other side, Bryant Park was a well known location for drug deals.   Crime of all kinds was setting records.   

Then, on April 19, more than six thousand New York State prison guards went on strike, in direct violation of a law which prohibited public employees from walking off the job.   Correctional facilities were already overflowing.  Now there were palpable fears for public safety.  The National Guard was called in to man the prisons, prompting cries of "scab" and leading to violence on the picket lines.  

The prison guard strike was our lead story at WOR for the better part of sixteen days.   It felt like sixteen months.  

But on the early morning of May 4 came a surprise.  Negotiators for the state and the guards' union, working all night, unexpectedly reached an agreement to end the walkout.  The city and the state breathed an almost audible sigh of relief.   

I arrived at WOR at 4 am, and part of my job was to consult with our writers and anchors and identify the big lead story of our morning news shows, with a cumulative audience of more than a million people.

Had the strike ended on almost any other day, my choice would have been a slam dunk.  But May 4 was also the day that Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain.  

A section of the WOR Radio newsroom as it appeared  in 1979.  The editor's desk is the large "box" in the center.  At right, behind the manual typewriter, is editor Jim Yoell.   Courtesy New York Radio News.  

My team and I all debated and reflected on the pros and cons for a few minutes - something that doesn't happen very much in the news industry these days.  An end to a labor dispute that endangered the public, we decided, surely meant more to our listeners than a new leader across the sea in England.  

So we led with the prison strike.  Thatcher would be our second story.  

After the end of our first 15-minute news block at 6 am, I got a call at the desk from WOR's News Director, Reg Laite.   He had just heard our broadcast from home, and had other ideas.  

"Why are you leading with the strike?  Your lead-all has to be Thatcher," he instructed me.   "Move the end of the prison strike down to the second slot."  

I asked Laite why.  After all, we'd been leading with the prison standoff for more than two weeks.   Wasn't it just a more significant story?  

"Thatcher is bigger," he grunted.  "It's huge.  It's historic.  Maybe you're too young to see.  She is the first woman to lead a Western power.  Go with it."  

You can debate about what the right call was on that particular morning.  But history, the ultimate judge, would prove my boss correct, and me wrong. 

Remember - this was before the rest of the world had ever really heard of Margaret Thatcher.  It was before she faced down unionized coal miners, heralding a changed game for Britain's economy.  And it was well before the election of Ronald Reagan, the rise of democracy in Poland, fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism - all events in which Thatcher's resolve played a key role.

And, of course, Meryl Streep won an Oscar for portraying an iron lady - not a prison guard.   Today it seems downright silly to compare the two.  

Now, more than ever, we live in an era where moonbeams pass as news.  Now you see it, now you don't.   The lesson I took from the election of Margaret Thatcher still prompts me to ask a simple question about every story I write, and read:  

What's it gonna mean in 30 years?  

REMEMBERING BOB TEAGUE: Just get the job done

The no-nonsense philosophy of a groundbreaking New York TV journalist

by Doug Spero

I am sick to hear the news about Bob Teague's passing.  Teague and Gabe Pressman were my two mentors, both of whom I used to field produce a lot before I went on the air myself in 1985. 

The "Black Arrow," as Teague was known in a day when there were only a handful of African-Americans in TV news, was the fastest reporter I ever worked with.  And as a field producer, I can tell you he was also one of the best.  
 
Teague came out of the newspaper business.  His philosophy was straightforward.  Get in and get out.  Just set him up.  Put him on the story... and day is done.   No nonsense... no BS. 

The sooner his story was shot and edited, the quicker he could go downstairs to Hurley's, the longtime NBC watering hole, for his "Martin."  His sheer feel for news  allowed him to do better work with less sweat than anyone. 

A few special memories:
 
- Teague was the first reporter on duty (7am) when I was WNBC's assignment editor.  Just give him a story and get him out the door.  

Bob Teague in an NBC publicity photo from the 1960's.  One of New York's first black television journalists, Teague, whose colleagues nicknamed him ":The Black Arrow" for his straightforwardness, died on March 28 at age 84. 

- He would accept any reasonable story.  But if it was BS, and he knew it and you knew it, as an assignment editor, you gave him something else.
 
- He would sometimes complain if he had to go back out again and cover another story - why should he be punished because he had worked so efficiently on the first one?

- Race was never an issue with Teague.  He was equally tough when interviewing blacks and whites.  He also detested laziness in anyone, whatever their race or gender.
 
- Bob was the only reporter I ever worked with who memorized a script, word for word,  on the way to a story in the crew car.  He would hold the end of a pencil to his lips (as a microphone) and start to rehearse his lines on the way there... and it worked for him.  How on earth can you write a script in your head before arriving at a story?  If you're Bob Teague, you can. 

- Then - as he was thinking through the story in his head and mumbling into the pencil - when he hit something he didn't like, he would say "dammit" (or something stronger)  and start over, like slamming return on the carriage of a manual typewriter. You never let on what a riot this was to watch.  You never bothered Bob Teague when he was "composing."
 
I never had a bad word with Teague, either on the assignment desk or while field producing.  Wherever we worked, if we wrapped up early and there was a bar nearby, we would have an adult beverage or two before the courier came for the videotape.   Today, as with so much else in New York, the local dive has been replaced by a gourmet sandwich and espresso bar.  
 
So, Bob -  as Bob Hope used to say - thanks for the memories.  Wish I could attend his funeral, if there will be one.  I will have a drink for him at my card game tonight.  

Doug Spero, a former reporter and assignment editor for New York’s WNBC TV and Radio, is a special consultant to Dunlop Media.  He is a professor of Communications at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

NAME IT TO CLAIM IT: With one word, the new pope can tweet what he hopes to achieve

by Steve Dunlop

We've heard it for some time now.  The Roman Catholic Church is in an extraordinary crisis.  It is haunted by corruption, dogged by scandal, held back by hidebound traditions, and beset by a creaking bureaucracy. 

Crisis, corruption, bureaucracy.   Extraordinary, haunted, dogged, creaking, hidebound.  Those words are what we call "value terms" in communications training. 

They are not plain vanilla language.  Each of those words is an argument - a self-contained claim.  And claims, by their nature, are conceptual. 

Powerful claims evoke images.  They are shorthand for the pictures in our heads.  And while you can see them throughout storytelling, our always-on culture has made claim words indispensable. 

Enter Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergolio - who must have recognized that in the 140-character age, even the pope has to walk the walk.  He needed a claim word that would instantly capture his hopes for the Church, and enable the world - especially the Catholic world - to quickly grasp his mindset.   

Pope Francis in his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter's in Rome.  ​

He settled on Francis.   It's only seven characters long, but it's not just tweet-friendly.  It is one of the strongest value terms in the Catholic world. 

Among the last 10 popes, we have seen three Piuses, two Benedicts, one John, one Paul, two John Pauls, and a Leo.  None of those monikers stakes as strong a "claim" as St. Francis of Assisi - and you don't have to be Christian to appreciate that. 

There are at least four core values that the name Francis stirs up in the imagination:

Francis of Assisi is one of the strongest "value terms" in the Catholic world.

• Poverty.  Although born into a rich merchant family, Francis of Assisi renounced his wealth and lived among the poor in 13th century Italy.   The new pope shunned the palatial Archbishop's residence in Buenos Aires in favor of a small room in a downtown apartment building, heated by a single stove.  He did his own cooking and took the bus to work.

• Love of nature.   Francis is the patron saint of animals and ecology, and for many Catholic and Episcopal churches, an annual "Pet Blessing" on his feast day is their biggest public outreach of the year.   Already, you can find posts from animal rights and global warming groups blogging the hope that Pope Francis will be speaking out on their behalf. 

• Humility.  "Lord make me an instrument of Thy Peace," begins the Prayer of St. Francis, one of the most familiar prayers in the Catholic armamentarium.  "Where there is hatred, let me sow love."   In asking the crowd at St. Peter's to "bless" him before imparting his own blessing to them, Francis signaled an intention to approach his papacy with a model of servant rather than master. 

• Rebuilding.   This is the most obscure of Francis of Assisi's attributes, but in the context of today's church, perhaps the most relevant.   While praying before a crucifix in a crumbling, abandoned church, Francis experienced a vision of Christ commanding him to "rebuild my house which has fallen into ruin."  It doesn't take a theologian to make the obvious connection to  today. 

Which brings us full circle to the challenge of any leader in a culture driven by headlines and hash tags.  Value terms need evidence to be credible, and the evidence needs to be concrete. 

While even Pope Francis can't predict everything that his term has in store for the world, he is off to a great start - perhaps moreso than any of his recent predecessors - by strongly naming his claim.