Students Say ‘Sure’ and Get the News Reported

 

Home page of MMU Times, thanks to some new students getting involved.

Advising an online student news site has been a journey. The Mount Mercy Times at Mount Mercy University, where I teach, gave up a print newspaper last year.

I’m sure it was the right move. We were throwing away too many printed copies, and finding a newspaper in Iowa with a press to handle our small press run was becoming too difficult—too much cost, too much waste, too much hassle. Thus, now we’re the online Mount Mercy Times.

The biggest disadvantage of that is, even if the printed papers were mostly tossed, they were a visible reminder to the campus that the Times exists, and the need to fill a print edition pushed the students to organize, collaborate and get things done. Sadly, with no print deadline to push us, the Times produced far less journalism last year compared to years before.

It did not disappear, but it hasn’t yet found its legs as an online news source.

Still, today was a hopeful day. Mount Mercy was set to announce a new football program today, a big deal—but one of my few staff students (we’re still building the staff for this year), the sports editor, had class at the same time as the announcement was being made.

However, in a general education communication class I teach, there is a student who had expressed some interest in writing for the MMU Times this semester. The Oral Communication class ended at 11:20 a.m.—would this student be willing to rush over to the Plaster Athletic Complex, take a camera with him, and cover his first story?

He thought about it for a second. He has a science test this afternoon. But, heck, he had a few minutes. “Sure,” he said.

So, Jonas shot a picture of me to get used to the camera, and then took off. But a few minutes after class, he and Lillian, another student from the class, saw me walking across the Rohde Family Plaza, heading for the library. “Professor Sheller!” Lillian yelled. “Where is the ceremony?”

At the Plaster Athletic Complex. A quarter mile from where we stood. In 10 minutes. Jonas looked a little doubtful. “Can you give him a ride?” I asked Lillian. I would have offered, but I ride a bike to work and Jonas would not fit on my bike's front handlebars (besides, I had to meet a student in the library and could not go to the ceremony myself anyway).

She thought for a second. “Sure,” she said.

Sometimes, “sure” is the best thing you can have a student say.

Jonas, chauffeured by Lillian, covered his first news story—a major one, as it turned out, that ended up on the top of the Times home page.

Jonas Gutierrez, MMU students, writes his first story for the MMU Times, I hope he writes many more.

Not all my problems with the story were over, however. As anybody in the news business can tell you, shooting images and writing a story is only the start. Who would edit the story?

As it happened, Keira was in the Times office to take a mid-term exam in a PR writing class. Would she be willing to have me, both her professor and the Times faculty advisor, have her take a brief break to read and copy edit a story Jonas had just finished typing?

“Sure,” she said. Well, I don’t recall if she used that exact word, but it seemed to be the word of the day, and in any case, she agreed and did it so she said “sure” in spirit.

Keira Carper in the MMU Times office, where today she edited her first Times story. In the middle of a mid-term exam.

The ceremony started at 11:30 a.m. I put together a shell of a story based on a statement posted by MMU, so Jonas could have a head start entering his information. When he came to the Times newsroom in the library at about 12:15 p.m., he said “here is the camera, now I have to go take my exam.”

Great—but any chance you could add your quotes and finish the story before your exam? He didn’t exactly say “sure,” but I’m sure he meant it, because, again, he paused for a second, thought about it, and then agreed to do it. The story was drafted by 1. By 1:30, Keira had edited the story. By 2 or so, it was posted to the MMU Times web site.

Cheerleaders at ceremony. One of the images made for MMU Times by Jonas Gutierrez.

Well, reporting news on the same day is one advantage of being an online news source, over being a paper printed twice a month. Nevertheless, it was a roller-coaster of a day for me—would we have a story? Would we have images? Early this morning, it seemed like the stars would not align, but here we were in the afternoon with a news web site updated.

There’s more to come. Another student shot more images at the ceremony, and I’m sure we’ll update the Times web site with a longer photo gallery from this big day as soon as I get my hands on the Times camera that she used. And our sports editor will be collecting campus reaction for a second-day reaction story on the news.

Still, score one for student news media at MMU. They pushed themselves, and scored a sports news touchdown today. And may many more students say “sure” and keep student news alive at Mount Mercy University.

A Classy Class Visit from Another Tiger

Nicole Agee speaks March 22, 2022 in a Mount Mercy University journalism class. This image was made by a student in the class--images in this post are about half my work, half student work.

The focus of good journalism shouldn’t be the journalist—an important point made by Nicole Agee, a local TV anchor (KCRG-TV Channel 9, Cedar Rapids, Iowa) in one of my classes.

“I’m not the story, the people I interview are the story,” she said.

Agee kindly volunteered to visit the class and talk about journalism storytelling, in particular, storytelling via video. As a sample, she showed a clip from KOMU, the Columbia, Missouri TV station associated with the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism.

In video, the images and sounds are a key part of the reporting. Video in a story, Agee said, “takes the place of words.”

Here and below, four more image of Nicole Agee speaking.

It’s a large and complicated idea—it helps explain many of the differences between journalists who primarily work in words (we used to call it “print,” although these days, I read New York Times stories on a screen) vs those who are using video recordings. Agee also noted that radio, such as presented by NPR, is another medium with its own story telling style.

But whether words, video or audio, a journalist needs to be an accurate and compelling story teller.

Besides that, I think a beginning journalist needs to be ready to dive in—to get more experience however they can. Agee herself noted a history as a high school and college newspaper journalist before pursuing a graduate degree in broadcasting at Mizzou.

Agee also had some interesting thoughts on the skills needed to be a journalist. Primarily, she argued for the centrality of journalistic curiosity. “We want to know more, we want to know why,” Agee said.

In fact, she said it’s easier to work with a curious new journalist than with a new journalist who considers themself primarily a great writer. “It’s easy to train somebody to write well,” said.

Well, she’s wrong about that and right about it at the same time. A person has to have some base level language expression skills in order to be competent enough to be trainable as a writer. And I think curiosity is a driving force of most really good writers—to be a writer is not just to have facility with the language, it’s to have facility with ideas that can be expressed in language, which requires curiosity.

Annie Barkalow, managing editor of the MMU Times, listens to Nicole Agee.

But she’s right, too. Given a base level of writing competence, it’s easier to work on the information processing skills—whether writing, making images or shooting video—of a curious person. Students who struggle in one of my editing courses don’t always agree, but anybody can learn to create a page or web site using InDesign. What’s harder to teach is what should be on the page.

What’s required is the curiosity to seek new answers to common questions. Where do you go for information? What information is important for an audience you’re serving?

Curiosity may kill cats, but it is the life force of journalists.

So, although I work a lot at trying to teach writing—I think I’m fundamentally in agreement with Agee.

Me, helping a student solve a problem with a camera.

She made another key point, too. That is, a journalist must cultivate connections. She referred to building a personal Rolex when you arrive in a new community (while noting the term is outdated, today a network of contacts may be more related to a list on an Android phone than written cards that are quickly becoming antiques). In other words, a good journalist is active and aware and builds contacts before they must begin working on a given story.

I like to think of it as related to the role of imagination in journalism. That is, journalism, if done correctly, is not at all fiction. None of it is made up. But a journalist must be able to see possibilities, to sense patterns—not to impose narratives, to but recognize them and act on them. That’s related to the challenges of writing and editing, but also to the ability to think creatively when casting the net for information—for cultivating and well using a wide range of connections. An information, or source, network.

I can't imagine what Nicole Agee was thinking about here, but whatever, it was worth listening to here.

And the best photographers and videographers also have imagination. Again, not for deep fakes, but to know when to shoot and what to shoot and where to be to get the image or the recording.

The class Agee visited was small—the smallest introduction to journalism class I’ve had in my time as a professor. Yet, as she noted, the skills one learns in a newsroom—working on deadline, being flexible, imaging the possibilities, acting on your curiosity—serve professionals in a variety of circumstances.

She was speaking of the many former journalists she knows who are working in other venues. I think it is one reason why college journalism remains important for a university. Of course, student journalists serve their community as journalists serve any community, by making overt what is hidden and should be known. But they serve themselves, too—developing habits of mind and skills that are keys to a curious, interesting, well-written life.

Final image.

Jada Veasey of MMU is Best Student Journalist in Iowa

Senior nursing student Jada Veasey named "Pat Pisarik Student Journalist of the Year" by Iowa College Media Association.

Today was a big day for journalism at Mount Mercy University. I knew what was coming, although I couldn’t tell anybody.

Each year, the Iowa College Media Association gives an award called the “Pat Pisarik Student Journalist of the Year” to one student. This year, the judges said there were three outstanding journalists from three colleges who became the finalists—and the winner is from Mount Mercy University. Times Editor-in-Chief Jada Veasey.

And Jada doesn’t even major in journalism. I’ve had a nursing student be editor-in-chief of the Times before (I am the paper’s faculty advisor), but the previous leader did at least minor in journalism. Jada basically leads the staff of a university newspaper capably from life experience—I’m not sure she’s taken even one of my journalism courses, yet she is among the most talented student journalists MMU has ever had.

It comes from several sources. One, Jada is in the news habit. She comes from a home where there was always a newspaper, and she’s always been a news reader—an important education that many communication students are too short on. Two, while she hasn’t taken a journalism class, she is a natural writer, a talented story teller with a flair for choosing the right words. Again, I think this comes mainly from being a lifelong, active reader. Three, she’s mission driven. She believes in the importance of journalism and student journalism, a civics lesson lost on too many these days.

Jada has been particularly important in helping the Mount Mercy Times cover the Covid-19 pandemic. She wrote the news story about a student who died. She had a hand in a set of staff editorials that were recognized as the best in the state, all of them on the pandemic. The headlines of those winning editorials:

• “Mustangs: We Must do More to Fight this Deadly Pandemic,” Nov. 19, 2020.
• “The ‘Kim Reaper?’ Iowa Not Getting Leadership State Needs in Pandemic,” Feb. 18, 2021.
• “We may be tired of pandemic, but it’s not tired of us,” Sept. 16, 2021.

Besides Jada, other MMU students honored included Annie Barkalow, managing editor; Gwen Johnson, opinion editor; and Veronica Jons, last year’s editor-in-chief.

Annie Barakalow and Jada Veasey, managing editor and editor-in-chief of the MMU Times.

Gwen Johnson, opinion editor.

Veronica Jons, who graduated last year, former editor-in-chief of Times.

Annie wrote a news story about problems with a city bike rental program and rented bikes being left on campus. “Needed or Nuisance? City VeoRide vehicles sometimes clutter campus” was the main front page story on Sept. 30, 2021, and was recognized as the best investigative news story in the state.

“Anne with an e,” Annie’s blog, was named the best student blog in the state. Gwen’s “The Girl in the Chair” was second.

The Times was recognized with a second-place for headline writing, too. And one of its front pages was the best in the state (click on image to see larger PDF version):

So, a total of six awards for the paper, including four first-place awards—that is good results. But the Pat Pisarik award for Jada? That was outstanding, and well deserved. I wrote a letter that was part of her application, here it is, and I meant every word. I’m proud of all the students who work so hard at providing MMU with a vibrant student media.

Getting Ready for 9/11 Speech I Dread

Dr. Joe Hendryx introduces the first event in this year's Fall Faculty Series at MMU. On Sept. 29, Dr. Jim Jacobs, a computer science professor, reviewed events in history that led to 9/11. Jacobs served in the Marines in the decade before, and interspersed his experience with research.

In the Mount Mercy Times, the excellent student editor-in-chief wrote a recent book review of “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” and one point Jada Veasey made in her review is that she finally understands why there is so little fiction about the flu pandemic following World War I.

“As it turns out, living in the time of a plague is terrible, like, absolutely the worst,” she writes, which tends to discourage authors.

Jada and I share high regard for John Green’s nonfiction book.

But the pandemic isn’t all that makes these times so troubling. Besides battling a new virus that is killing far too many, we’re also facing a rising tide of BS.

Which is not a coincidence. It helps explain the lameness of our pandemic response. And that rising tide of disinformation got a boost just as the internet was becoming a huge factor in our lives two decades ago.

MMU Fall Faculty Series 2021 log.

A handful of hijackers, armed with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters, brought down three airplanes on prime targets on Sept. 11, 2001. They struck the Pentagon and caused the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York.

Speculation is that the Capitol, stormed by our own delusional right-wing mobs on Jan. 6 of this year, was also a target, but passengers fought back and the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

Conspiracy is not new to the human condition. John Wilkes Booth didn’t entirely act alone when he gunned down Abraham Lincoln. The shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and brought on both World War I and it’s sequel, World War II, was fired by a young man who was part of a shadowy nationalist group.

We humans conspire all the time. But we also imagine, enlarged and embellish false conspiracy narrratives. All kinds of wild tales grow up around fantastic, unexpected events—and 9/11 was the Mother of all Conspiracy hotbeds.

It spawned an early viral internet video, even before YouTube was a thing, that fed the conspiracy narratives.

And today, we live in a communication environment rife with speculations that seem farfetched to most rational people, but still move millions to believe.

For example, many believe:

• The Chinese government developed the virus for COVID-19. In China, the corresponding lie is that the Americans did it. We don’t in truth know the origins of this virus, and the lack of transparency by an authoritarian government isn’t being helpful. I don’t know that China did it. I don’t know that they did not. Nobody, except those potentially involved, yet does, and in the unknowing is fertile ground for uninformed certainty.

• Donald Trump had the election stolen. He didn’t. He lost in 2020 by about the margin he won the race by in 2016. The persistence of this particular false narrative, and its fervent backing by too many Republicans, is an existential threat to our democracy based on a fake conspiracy theory.

• Insert X false narrative about the current pandemic. Masks don’t matter. Vaccines aren’t safe. Microchips from Bill Gates. Whatever. This pandemic seems to breed false claims faster than a flexible respiratory virus morphs into new variants. Both the infection and the lies surrounding it are proving hard to fight.

So, I’m going to tackle this big topic next Wednesday night as part of the Mount Mercy University fall faculty series called “9/11 Twenty Years Later.”

I don’t exactly know what to expect. I thought Dr. Jim Jacobs gave interesting context to the whole 9/11 event, and I feel like I’m sort of looking at it from the other side—how that event has reverberated in our information and disinformation cyberspace.

Dr. Jim Jaobs speaks Sept. 29.

The towers weren’t the only thing that seemed to fall on 9/11. Our very trust in ourselves and in reality seems a bit more fragile, two decades later.

Sadly, I’m mostly going to describe the problem. I don’t have a solution, but then again, I don’t know how to end the pandemic, either. Plagues and pandemics can linger for years, but don’t last forever. Maybe there’s some hope that the public may tire of the nonsense, that “doing your own research” may come to mean actually using some discretion on which sources you’ll believe rather than tuning into the alt-universe of lies.

I hope the presentation, called "Conspiracy, Myth and Misinformation," goes well. But I’m writing, not about the pandemic, but about something that does not make me happy, and that I don’t really want to be writing about.

Jada, I feel your pain. But I hope to see many people next Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Flaherty. If the pandemic makes you worry, make sure to join in via MMU’s YouTube live-stream.

Not every internet video feeds the disinformation monster.

How We Frame Memories of 9/11

Plumes of smoke from The World Trade Center twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. From Wikimedia Commons via flickr poster Michael Foran.

Today is Sept. 4, which means the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States is one week from today.

The 9/11 events were so big that “9/11” is all one has to say and everyone knows you don’t mean any Sept. 11—you mean that Sept. 11.

The world didn’t exactly change 20 years ago. The forces that attacked my country that day had been at work for some time—indeed, there had previous bombing attempts to destroy the World Trade Center. But that September day, sunny and beautiful in Iowa, at least in my memory, was still a pivotal day.

From the FBI's web site, FBI.gov, a timeline of Sept. 11, 2001.

I have a little trouble picturing myself at 43. I was already greying—did I still have some dark hair? A man in his 60s has a little trouble picturing the world of the 40-something year old. Much in my life has remained the same, and much has changed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I had a son in elementary school. My oldest daughter was nearing the end of high school, but was adjusting to a large public school—Linn Mar High School—after her first two years of secondary education had been at a tiny Catholic High School—St. Mary’s in Storm Lake, Iowa.

We had just bought a house in Cedar Rapids. The next year would be financially a little dicey for us, as we owned two houses. But both my wife and I had jobs, she at the birth center at Mercy Medical Center (where she would become the nurse manager in a few years), me at the start of a new career. I was fresh out of the world of journalism and into the world of academia, less than a month into my new job teaching at what was then Mount Mercy College.

A hole in the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. Defense Department image by Cpl. Jason Ingersoll, USMC, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

That Tuesday, I was buying tires for our van. I was at a tire shop near Lindale Mall that morning, and it was a very strange morning. Very few people were out, and I was the only customer at what would usually be a busy shop. I think six guys were working on replacing my tires, each taking 2-minute shifts or so before they traded off—the rest to join me in the customer lounge, watching TV. Special report from New York, a plane has struck the World Trade Center. Then, another. The Pentagon. A planned second attack on Washington, D.C., ending with a crashed plane in Pennsylvania.

I can’t recall a lot from that day other than the sense of shock. I was teaching a class that fall that I’m teaching this semester, too—CO 280, Writing for Public Relations. It was an afternoon class, I think, and I scrapped my lesson plan.

We rearranged the room in a big circle. And the students and I just talked about it, the big news of the day.

My wife and I visited the Newseum in Washington, D.C. during spring break, March, 2015. This is a ruined TV tower that been atop the World Trade Center on display at that museum.

And here we are, almost 20 years later. Two decade of grappling with new realities, of questioning what freedom means, of foreign wars and increasing polarization at home. The internet existed in 2001, but way back then we didn’t carry it around in our pockets and we still watched big events on a chunky, square TV in the customer lounge of a tire shop.

I am just starting to look into it, but I don’t think our current era of struggling with fakery on social media is unrelated to 9/11. That day shook America to its core, and became one of those improbable, shocking events around which wild conspiracy theories swirl.

Another image from that 2015 visit to the Newseum. A wall of headlines reporting 9/11 attacks, from an era when news media mattered more than social media.

Partly, of course, because it was the result of a shadowy conspiracy, and unpacking it is a process historians will be tied up with for decades.

What does it all mean? A lot, and I’m glad that Mount Mercy University will spend some time grappling with this key world event.

Every year, faculty at MMU designated a topic for a series of public discussions—the Fall Faculty Series. I am proud to have helped start this with our first series in 2014 being on the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I.

This year, the Series has a very simple title: 9/11: Twenty Years Later.” Five faculty members, including me, will give free, public Wednesday talks, all of which will start at 6 p.m., and all of which will take place in Flaherty Community Room in Basile Hall.

Logo of 2021 Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy University.

Here is the schedule, the topics and the speakers:

• Sept. 29, Precursor Events: At War before 9/11, James Jacobs, associate professor of computer science.
• Oct. 6, Conspiracy, Myth, and Misinformation, Joe Sheller, associate professor of communication & MMU Times advisor.
• Oct. 27, Heroism and Sacrifice after the Attack, Norma Linda Mattingly, associate professor of education.
• Nov. 9, Fear and Trauma after 9/11, Dennis Dew, associate professor of psychology.
• December 1, Reflections of a Muslim-American Immigrant, Ayman Amer | associate professor of economics.
  

Assembling Campus Views for Student Use

Fall view of MMU Warde Hall cupola. With blurry birds.

A student of mine in a one-on-one directed study is doing a student media project—he is building a new web site for the campus newspaper, using an online template.

The site he’s posting to uses banners on pages—very cropped, horizontal images. For that use, and for other possible random use on the site he is creating, the student wanted a variety of images of the Mount Mercy campus.

Over the years, I’m sure the student paper’s photographers have shot the campus many times, but mostly those images are narrative—they are part of telling a specific news story. They aren’t background or scenic, so were not the kind of image he wanted.

I, on the other hand, sometimes waste my time by shooting stuff just because I think it’s pretty. And the student wanted lots of campus shots showing pretty views, some MMU icons and the campus in a variety of seasons. So, I did a quick scan of recent (past two years or so) Facebook photo galleries of mine, and came up with these images.

I liked the results. I was surprised I didn’t have more pictures of the Grotto or Chapel of Mercy, and I am sure over the year I have more of those pictures, but again I was sticking only with recent images.

Sit back, relax and enjoy what I hope is pleasing look at some of my recent images of the pretty Mount Mercy University campus:

Another view from fall.

Sister Mary Frances Xavier Warde. Often called Sister Frances Warde.

Wall of Sisters of Mercy University Center.

Oldest image in this set--I think this came from inauguration of current president. The MMU Mace carried at key ceremonies by a senior faculty member.

Sun shines in Chapel of Mercy.

Spring at Warde Hall is announced each year by magnolia bush.

Daffodils in Our Lady of Sorrows Grotto.

Cheers at Plaster Athletic Complex.

Mustang Sally.

Iowa hawk eyes campus from Warde Hall.

Several sky images--MMU is on a hill and is one of the prime places in Cedar Rapids to watch the sunset.

Rohde Family Plaza.

Central campus at twilight.

And, of course, tunnels!

Walking in late afternoon light, Basile Hall in Background.

The woman, the legend, the mother of us all--Sister Catherine McAuley.

Blue winter sky.

Ceremony on plaza.

Cupola.

Green space turns many colors.

Inside the Sisters of Mercy University Center.

School colors held by Sister Catherine McAuley.

Final view--top of cupola of Warde Hall framed by leaves.