CCJ Tools

Thinking outside the box is harder than it sounds – pretty much by definition.

But how you choose to tell a story -- the method you select -- tells a story of its own: about your fears and your strengths and your comfort level using unfamiliar tools. With so many ways to tell a story it’s a small wonder that newsrooms may be overwhelmed with the choices, and eager to take refuge in the familiar.

It's tough enough watching your language to avoid gaffes that can be seized upon as evidence of bias or worse.

But what about our colleagues whose jobs it is to exaggerate? What are editorial cartoonists doing these days with two presidential candidates who aren't middle-aged white guys?

The Knight Citizen News Network provides a handy, wallet-sized (well, not really) set of rules by which any decent journalist should abide -- if for no other reason that doing so will lessen the chances you'll be hauled into court.

The conventional wisdom that emerged in the run-up to the New Hampshire primary was widely reported: Barack Obama's decisive victory in Iowa's Democratic caucuses would slingshot him into a Granite State victory, and then ...

When you slipped through that swinging door from the cramped newsroom to the expansive composing room, it was almost like you were walking into a factory. And in a sense, you were – a news factory.

A new study traces more than thirty years of changing public attitudes toward the news media, and unhappily finds that to know journalism is to disdain it. Timothy E. Cook and Paul Gronke, in the July edition of Political Communication, find that “for the heaviest consumers of the news (the more educated, the better-off, older respondents),…familiarity with the news product breeds a lack of confidence (if not contempt) with the press as an institution.”

It's easy to get caught up in the back and forth between the two main candidates in a race or between the two main sides in a ballot initiative, but most campaigns are much bigger than that. Campaigns are about communities and voters too. Here are some ways to expand your coverage.

In the wake of the Mitchell report to baseball, Mark Jurkowitz’s article in The Phoenix in Boston is perhaps more timely today than when it originally appeared almost two years ago.

He writes:

Last week was an important moment in the history of American journalism. After reading the explosive steroids-scandal book Game of Shadows, written by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, baseball commissioner Bud Selig finally emerged from his cocoon of denial to announce an investigation into the performance-enhancing drugs that have cast a cloud over the sport and particularly over San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds, who is 47 home runs away from catching all-time leader Hank Aaron.

It probably won’t be easy, but bless John Reiss for trying. Reiss, the senior broadcast producer at NBC Nightly News, has launched a campaign to get verbs back on the air at his network.