Why does locker room access matter to sports journalists?

In the wake of the spreading COVID-19 corona virus pandemic, all of the major sports leagues in North America have announced that they are closing locker room access to reporters. The Associated Press Sports Editors issued a joint statement with the directors of six major writers’ organizations:

We understand precautions may be necessary in the name of public health. We are intent on working with the leagues, teams and schools we cover to maintain safe work environments. We also must ensure the locker room access — which we have negotiated over decades — to players, coaches and staff is not unnecessarily limited in either the short or long term.

This is tricky. Because let’s be honest — this is, at least in part, an opportunistic and cynical move by the leagues. If you’re still allowing 20,000 fans to come to games and interact with arena personnel and be in the same building as the players, you can’t tell say that closing locker rooms to a handful of reporters is being done out of safety concerns. It’s health security theater.

But, at a time when entire countries are being quarantined, when the efficacy of our own government’s preparation and reaction is being questioned, when schools could be closed leaving many kids without meals or safe places to go, when the most vulnerable populations are susceptible to this new illness, demanding that sports reporters be allowed into a locker room seems like a bad fight to pick at the moment.

Let’s look at the big picture, though. Why is locker room access so important to sports journalists?

This is a central topic in my research of the work routines of sports reporters. Here’s what I learned about this from interviewing sports writers and editors for my dissertation.

For sports journalists, access to and relationships with sources drive their work. Sports reporters rely on talking to coaches and players to describe the success and failings of a team the same way a city hall reporter relies on talking to the mayor and council members. That access to coaches, players, team officials and other sources is seen as crucial, which is why the reporters and editors get upset at anything that restricts it. One editor told me:

You’re gonna write about who you have the access to. If you aren’t around the players and you’re relying on what you’re hearing from sources, that may not be the most reliable, it hurts the reporting, it hurts the stories you can tell, it hurts the reporting, and really I think it’s a detriment to everybody.

So why the locker room? To sports journalists, locker room access is the gold standard of access. That’s because sports journalists see it as a chance to build one-on-one relationships with the sources that they cover—which, to the journalists, is a fundamental aspect of the job. “That’s how you used to get good relationships going and people would tell you what's going on and they just won’t (anymore),” one reporter said. A longtime editor explained it this way

In a world where everything comes off the podium, you know the quarterback speaks behind podium after the game, the head coach speaks behind the podium after the game, in a world where there’s a podium, you need to have, like, real actual human interaction with people to get them to trust you. If the people who are part of the (team) see you working hard and know that you’re trustworthy and feel that they’ll be able to get a fair shake out of what you’re writing — good, bad, or indifferent — then they’ll trust you with more information. And I mean, that (trust) can’t come from the fact that they’re behind a podium and you’re sitting in a group of 30 people. It’s gotta come from that one on one, you see somebody in an airport, you run into them at the Wawa, you see them in the hallway. I think that’s why it’s important. Because it’s all about building real relationships, and you can’t build those relationships when everything’s at an arm’s length.

The three gifts my mother gave me

This is the eulogy I delivered for my mom, Kathy Moritz, who died on Feb. 16.

To honor my mother, I'm going to keep this short.

First of all, on behalf of my dad, Amy and myself, to all of you here ... I'm sorry for YOUR loss.

Three gifts my mother gave me.

The first is an undying love of college basketball.

My mom loved all sports. Every Sunday in football season, my phone would ring around 4:30 or so, and instead of hello, we'd just say. "How bout them Bills?" - the level of sarcasm depending on the result. One of her favorite places in the world was at a baseball stadium on a nice summer day.

But college basketball was her first love, and she had a world-class basketball mind. She knew Tim Duncan would be a star after seeing him play one game in 1994. She knew about Gonzaga being a top program before any East coast media member had heard of them. When my sister and I were both reporters covering college basketball, we routinely called her for advice ... and it was always really good.

There's no doubt my mom is with the communion of saints right now, handing out her NCAA bracket pool and making sure everyone pays up.

The second gift my mother gave me was a love of words.

People often asked how my sister and I both became writers, and the truth is we were destined to because we grew up in a house where reading mattered. Three daily newspapers, which my mother always read - backward to forward, for reasons that I still don't understand. Books everywhere. Regular trips to the library. One thing that stands out to Amy and me is that every gift giving occasion, we always got books. That love of writing and of reading, the importance of education, the value and the company that comes from your favorite book and staying up late to read, is my mom's legacy in my house.

Don't get me wrong: My mother was an impatient, stubborn old polish lady. She was an impatient, stubborn old polish lady when she was in her 40s, and probably in her 30s and 20s as well.

But that impatience and stubbornness came from a good place. It came from a place of love and of loyalty, of making sure that people were treated fairly, that no one got special treatment they didn't deserve, that everyone got a fair shake.

And there was no one my mother loved more than her family.

And that's all of you here. She'd say she'd be upset that you're all here, "making a fuss," but inside, she'd be so happy you were here. Her family from Emmet Belknap. Her family from the board office and from around Lockport. Her family family.

There is nothing more important than family. The family you're born into and the family you make.

And that is the third gift my mother gave me.

Bobby Knight, and trusting your journalistic instincts.

Bob Knight returned to Indiana for the first time in 20 years on Saturday.

Knight, and the story of his firing, played a role in my reporting of the biggest story of my career.

When Knight was fired before the start of the 2000 season, there was an interview that ESPN (I believe) conducted with an Indiana player. I can't tell you who it is, and I couldn't find a clip on YouTube (if anyone has it, it's Galen Clavio). But I remember watching it in my apartment in Olean, N.Y., and I remember the reporter asking if the player if the team was going to play its games this season.

I don't know, the player said.

In March of 2003, the St. Bonaventure player eligibility scandal occurred. Mike Harrington and I were breaking stories. The night the scandal broke, after a long day of writing and reporting, I stopped back by my apartment. I put on the local news to catch up on what the Buffalo TV stations were reporting. Just before heading back to the newsroom, I saw a reporter — again, in my memory, it was from the now-defunct Empire Sports Network, but I can't say that for sure — say that the St. Bonaventure players were meeting.

At that moment, I flashed back to that interview with an Indiana player three years earlier.

"They're voting on whether or not they're playing the rest of the season." I thought to myself.

I had zero reporting at that point that anything was going on with the players. It was pure journalistic instinct. But I did the only thing to do - got in the car and drove to campus. I found nothing there, but within a few hours, I had heard that players were leaving campus. The boycott happened the next day. I had a head start on the story in part because of my instincts from watching that interview.

In part because of Bob Knight.

The journalistic lesson — you never know what you're going to remember. You never know what's going to stick in your memory, what's going to jog that memory, or when it's going to be useful. But when it happens, follow your instincts. Trust them.

NYT: Roger Kahn, Who Lifted Sportswriting With ‘Boys of Summer,’ Dies at 92

Roger Kahn, whose book 'Boys of Summer' is widely and correctly considered to be one of the greatest sports books every written, died Thursday at the age of 92.

From Bruce Weber's obituary in The New York Times:

While Mr. Angell’s elegant essays were contemporaneous reports on the game, Mr. Kahn seized on techniques of the so-called new journalism; for one thing, he became a character in his own narrative. And with a title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem, he turned his book into a meditation on fathers and sons, the passage of time, teamwork, civil rights and the nature of men — themes so seductive and enduring that in connection with baseball they ring as clichés today.

Kobe Bryant and the rarity of communal news.

It was just about 2:45 on Sunday afternoon.

My family and I were on a Metro North train, the Hudson line, heading home after a weekend celebrating my daughter’s love of Broadway, when I looked at Twitter and saw a few people tweeting about Kobe Bryant, how they couldn’t believe it, how it couldn’t be true, how they hoped the news was wrong.

Then I saw the tweet from TMZ.

BREAKING: Kobe Bryant Has Died In A Helicopter Crash https://t.co/42oINV9ZUU

— TMZ (@TMZ) January 26, 2020

Since I was across the aisle from my wife, I texted her the link to the Tweet.

My wife — who is not a sports person, and who in fact is bored to naptime by basketball — gasped.

Over the next few minutes, we scrolled our respective Twitter feeds. We’ve had several conversations in the past about TMZ’s credibility as a news source, and how for all of the rightful ethical concerns about their newsgathering practices, for all of the gossip they print, on big stories like this, they’re usually right.

Then, a few minutes later, I saw a tweet from Woj confirming the news.

Kobe Bryant is among those dead in a helicopter crash outside Los Angeles, a source confirms to ESPN.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 26, 2020

At that point, I knew it was true.

Over the next few minutes, as the train pulled out of Grand Central Terminal, you could hear the murmurs start through the train, as the news was confirmed and as more people checked their phones and saw the news. Maybe 10 minutes into the drive, the conductor who was punching tickets said it out loud as he found out about Kobe Bryan’s death in a helicopter crash.

There are so many journalistic angles to this story. The aforementioned ethical practices of TMZ. The messiness of following breaking news on Twitter, how incorrect information is reported, spread, discredited, and corrected. What makes a credible source in Twitter journalism. The comparison between sports and news coverage of the story. The instant hagiography of Kobe and working his sexual assault accusation into the coverage. The use of social media as a public forum for grieving.

But part of me will always remember being on that Metro North train, pulling out of Grand Central up the Hudson River line, hearing the news trickle from row to row, seeing the news break in real time one person to another, a shared experience in an individualized age.

Rethinking the game story

While working on a recent writing project, I had a new thought technology about game stories.

The working assuming all in and around sports journalism has been that the traditional game story is dead. Everyone knows who won the game already, everyone can watch the highlights online, so don’t waste time writing a game recap.

What if … what if we went the opposite way.

What if assuming people have seen the game, we assume that they haven’t? What if sports journalists still wrote a short game recap to go with every story? I’m talking 10-12 inches, max. A classic inverted pyramid AP style game story. The kind that sports journalists are already filing right at the end of a game now, only instead of letting that drift off into the ether of the internet, we keep it around. We package it in print and online with the regular game coverage, where reporters find feature angles, give context, move tehs tory forward.

Call it the “Catch Me Up” or something like that.

The name, obviously, needs work.

But what if we’ve been conceiving the evolution of game stories all wrong?

The future of high-school sports coverage

Writing for the Nieman Lab prediction package, Dan Shanoff discusses LeBron James' son and high school sports coverage:

Heading into 2020, the DNA of intensive high school basketball coverage on Instagram, YouTube, and other non-traditional platforms is classic “shoe leather” observation, combined with modest cost requirements, new distribution platforms, and a seemingly limitless appetite from fans. 2020 won’t just be the year of Bronny — it’ll be the year when media organizations across the spectrum should invest further in the opportunity to experiment across the high school space.

So often when we talk about sports journalism and sports media, our focus is on the coverage of pro and men's college sports. Whether it's the popular press or the academic community, we tend to ignore the coverage of high-school sports.

In my dissertation from 2014, one of my most interesting findings was the fact that the great schism in sports journalism is not print vs. digital. It's high-school coverage vs. college/pros. For many reasons — staffing concerns, economic and technological limitations of both the markets and the audience — high school sports coverage has not been the center of innovation in sports journalism. In fact, it's often seen and held up as the paragon of traditional sports journalism values.

A big part of that is how the audience is viewed. The audience for high-school sports is generally seen as an older one, I think. It's grandparents who subscribe to the paper, parents who have a digital subscription. The idea has always been best articulated by my pal Mike Vaccaro, who has often said that while Derek Jeter's mom isn't clipping columns and posting them on her refrigerator, the high-school quarterback's mom is clipping game stories or features (or, to update that, posting them to Facebook).

But Shanoff's piece raises an important question - why are we not focusing our high-school sports coverage toward high-school students? Why are we not meeting them where they are — on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok? This isn't just at the level of Bronny, but for all high schools. What better way to start connecting with a young audience and turn them into lifelong readers?

Nieman Lab prediction: The end of "stick to sports"

For the second year in a row, I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute to the Nieman Lab's prediction package.

Last year, I wrote about subscriptions in digital journalism. This year, I wrote about politics in sports media:

Sports journalism will have a collective opportunity in the coming year: a chance to fully engage with readers and audiences rather than shrink from them. To talk up to them rather than down. To connect with them at a higher level. And to help sports fans engage with the world, not avoid it.

In so many ways, the story of America has been told through sports. That won’t change. And its next chapter won’t be told by “sticking to sports.”

You can read the entire piece here.

RIP Bill Lyon

Bill Lyon, the longtime columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, died Sunday at the age of 81.

My main memory of Lyon was an exchange he had with then-Temple coach John Chaney. Chaney had just won his 700th career game, so the post-game press conference was more crowded than a typical Temple-St. Bonaventure game. Near the end of the podcast, Chaney responded to a question (I think from Lyon) with a typical stream-of-conscious rant.

It’s a good thing you haven’t lost your passion, Lyon deadpanned. The press room cracked up, and Chaney rose from the table and pretended to storm out before laughing himself.

For someone who’s dream it was to write for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lyon was one of the gold standards.

Mike Sielski, who counted Lyon as a mentor, writes:

The clarity of his thinking, of his values, was obvious if you observed him working. There’s an old adage in sportswriting, an aspiration born of too many games and events on too many nights when hard deadlines loom: Be faster than everyone who is better than you, or be better than everyone who is faster than you. That adage did not apply to Bill. He was faster andbetter. The words seemed to flow directly from his brain to the screen, with only the clacking thumps of his index fingers against the keyboard reminding you that, yes, there was some labor involved here and, no, the job wasn’t as easy as Bill made it appear.

He wrote about sports in a manner that revealed something about himself, about the way he viewed the world and conducted himself in it. We should always tell the truth, of course, but we should be tolerant of others’ failings. We should remember that there is more to life than sports. We should remember that sports, at its best, is a stage that puts the indomitability of the human spirit on display for all to see. We should remember that sports means nothing and everything at the very same time.

You can read more from Mike here.

Deadspin, metrics, and the soul of journalism.

There are so many angles to the Deadspin story this week. Let’s spend a few minutes today on the metrics.

On Thursday, after virtually all of Deadspin’s staff quit over new owner G/O Media’s “stick to sports” edict, G/O media put out another statement defending the decision. It included:

“Non-sports content accounted for less than 1 percent of the page views on the site. Given these facts, we simply believe it makes sense to focus attention and resources on even more sports coverage to serve our readers what they want.

There’s a lot to parse here: Deadspin writers claim those numbers are false. And also if non-sports stories don’t get a lot of traffic anyway, what does it matter if they get done? But for our purposes, let’s discuss the philosophy behind G/O’s statement. The idea that a news organization needs to put its attention and resources on the content readers want.

On its face, it’s an understandable idea. It’s laudable, even. Look, this isn’t the golden days of the 1970s and 1980s anymore, when newspapers can send reporters to Africa to do a series on rhinos. The economics of news have changed. Staffs are smaller. They need to be more strategic in what they cover. Cool. OK.

One of the underrated changes to journalism in the past decade has been the emergence of analytics as a specific news value. Digital media provides us with far more nuanced and detailed statistics on what stories get read (along with when and how they are read) than we ever had in print (when the only real statistic was the number of papers sold). This means editors and reporters have incredibly granular detail on what readers are really reading. Given the economic realities of journalism in 2019, relying on them to make better decisions makes a certain amount of sense.

In theory.

In practice, it treats journalism like any other commodity. It turns journalism into selling shoes or couches or any other consumer good. It judges the value of a story simply by how many people viewed it.

And that’s simply antithetical to how journalism works best.

You can’t judge the value of a story by looking at how many people read it. At its core, journalism in the digital age is about creating, building and maintaining a community. If we want to rebuild trust with our readers, we need to look at that relationship as a community, not as a zero-sum business proposition.

That’s what Deadspin provided. It was more than a fun, insightful, snarky blog. It was a community. From Drew Magary’s farewell post:

The G/O Media statement confirmed the worst fears about its motives with Deadspin. In a weird way, this is worse than what Pete Thiel did to Gawker. That was reprehensible, but at least there was an ideology fueling it. This is soulless private equity at its worst, looking to turn a vibrant corner of the internet into another viral content factory.

Metrics matter. But when they are the sole basis for decision making, they suck the soul out of journalism.

Transforming trust in the news media

If you’ve noticed that this blog has been quiet this month, you’re right. 

The reason is that I spent much of October working on the 15th Dr. Lewis B. O’Donnell Media Summit. Working alongside an insanely talented student board, we hosted a day-long summit that included a panel discussion on the topic of trust in the media.

Trust is at the heart of several stories from the past few weeks in online journalism and sports media. 

There was the Houston Astros’ debacle. From a media perspective, the biggest part of that story was the Astros’ now-retracted initial statement, which purposely obfuscated the issue and cast doubt on Stephanie Apstein’s reporting for Sports Illustrated. The Astros’ statement called on fans to believe them over the media. You can read any number of Twitter threads and comment sections to see that, on some level, that worked. There were people willing to trust the team over the media. 

This is not built on anything the Astros have done, but instead is built on the foundation of general mistrust in the media. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. This is the result of decades of growing distrust in the media on all sides of American life. One thing that digital and social media have given rise to, anecdotally at least, is a seeming rise in both confirmation bias and social-identity theory. We seek out the information that supports our world view and dismiss that which doesn’t. If I am an Astros loyalist, I am going to trust the team I love more than a media member who, in my eyes, is trying to bring my team down. Because by tearing my team down, they’re tearing me down. 

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When I wrote above that the topic of the day was a lack of trust in media, what did you think of?

I bet there’s a good chance you thought about modern Republicans. About Trump and Fake News and the Liberal Media and all that. Right?

But the story out of Harvard last week — where student groups are boycotting the student newspaper because reporters called ICE for comment on a news story following an on-campus protest — shows this isn’t just a conservative thing. 

It should go without saying, but let’s say it anyway: The reporters for the Crimson did absolutely nothing wrong. They followed proper journalistic procedure. They sought comment from relevant parties, which is the job. They also did it AFTER the protest, which is an ethical journalistic move because it minimizes harm to participants (a fact that probably should have been clearer in the original story). 

But again, trust. The groups involved don’t trust ICE, and with good reason. But that distrust extends to the media. On the left, there is a belief that mainstream media are corrupted by the desire for access, by financial concerns, by a historically too-cozy relationship to those in power. Some of the critiques are fair, some aren’t. But they are real. 

And the answer is not to throw up our hands. The answer is not to lecture those on either side of the partisan divide about what our job is. 

It’s a lot more complicated than that. 

Lack of trust may not be a new issue. But the economic and distribution changes that have transformed media in the digital and social age have made it more acute. Because teams, social groups, organizations, politicians — they don’t need us anymore. They don’t need the press to get their message out. They can connect directly with their audiences without having to go through a media gatekeeper. So if they don’t trust the media, it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t need us. 

At the Media Summit at Oswego last week, the panelists discussed this issue. They agreed that this was not an issue that one person, one news organization, even one one generation can fix. It’s going to take all journalists, all media, doing better. 

How do we transform trust in media? It’s not a problem that’s going to be solved. In the media, we tend to think of it like Claire thinks of the raptors in Jurassic World, as something we can control. But in this digital age, maybe we need to think of trust like Owen views the raptors: It’s a relationship. If we think of our readers as less of an audience and more of a community, maybe we can start rebuilding some trust. Slowly.

Interview advice: Don't be afraid to look foolish (aka the lesson Lisa Loeb taught me)

At my first job out of college, I was our paper’s music writer. As such, I would get to interview the artists who were coming to play gigs at nearby St. Bonaventure University.

One year, Lisa Loeb was opening for the Goo Goo Dolls. I had scheduled a phone interview with her and had asked her record label to send me a copy of her new CD (this being the early 2000s, before streaming was a thing). The day of the interview came, and I still had not received the album yet. So I was interviewing her without listening to the album she was touring in support of.

One of my fist questions was what she liked about her new album.

What do you like about it? she asked back.

I froze.

What I should have said was “To be honest, I haven’t heard it it. I’m still waiting for my copy, but I’m really interested in what you like about it …” or something like that.

What I did do, because I was young and prideful and didn’t want to embarrass myself and did want to look cool in the eyes of Lisa Loeb, was awkwardly stammer something about how I liked the songwriting. She said she liked that too, and we had a pleasant chat.

I’m told a few days later, she made fun of me on stage for that answer. I didn’t hear this, so it may be apocryphal, but I really hope it’s true.

Because it points out a really important lesson for interviewing people.

Don’t afraid to be honest. Don’t try to look cool in front of them. Admit what you don’t know.

The worst thing you can do in an interview with a source is to fake it. To pretend you know what they are talking about when you don’t. Because in the end, you are hurting your work and your readers. If you don’t know what something is but pretend to because you don’t want to look foolish in front of another person, you won’t be able to inform your readers to the best of your ability.

One of my tools as a reporter, post-Lisa Loeb, was to be honest with the people I was interviewing. If I didn’t know something, I owned it. I asked them about it. If a pitcher was talking about his release point, I would say, “I’m sorry, this is probably the dumbest question you’ll get all day, but what do you mean by release point?” Same thing if a basketball player talked about shooting in rhythm, or what a matchup zone defense was.

Framing the question like that worked on two levels. For one, it disarmed the person I was interviewing. It made me a little more sympathetic in their eyes. I wasn’t this journalist who assumed he knew everything and was trying to make the player look bad. I was a guy asking a silly question. It brought them to my side.

On a second level, athletes and players LOVE talking about what they do. To be professionals or D-1 college athletes, they’ve spent years working on their games. It’s their lives. It’s their craft. To have someone genuinely interested in what they do made them want to talk to me, and talk more.

On a recent episode of The Other 51, Joe Posnanski talked at length about this:

So in an interview, don’t be afraid to look or sound dumb with your question. If you don’t know what something means, don’t be afraid to ask.

As I’ve often said, I’d rather look stupid in front of one person (my source) rather than sound stupid in front of 50,000 people the next day in the paper.

It’s the lesson Lisa Loeb taught me.

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The Athletic moves to Syracuse

Last year, when The Athletic was in full expansion mode, I was the wet blanket who wrote this:

But I’m concerned that that’s not translating down to the local level. And that’s where young writers are getting left out here. It’s not that they’re not getting hired at The Athletic. It’s that there aren’t jobs at the local and regional levels for them. There’s no branch of The Athletic in Olean or in Binghamton to help them out. I worry that we focus too much on the national level and ignore what’s happening at smaller newspapers.

I thought of this last week, when The Athletic announced at Syracuse University beat writer. Matthew Gutierrez will be covering the Orange for the site:

This season will be my third covering Syracuse, following two seasons as a beat writer for The Daily Orange, the student newspaper. Occasionally, when I’d look around the press seating, a lot of heads were buried in Twitter or emails. When at games, I try to look around and appreciate this gift: now. I’m 22, and there’s a lot I don’t know. But that keeps me seeking out new information, always searching for more.

Two things make this interesting. One - Matthew is a young reporter, just out of college. One of the top journalism programs in the country, to be sure, but still, he’s a young writers. It’s indicative of moves The Athletic has been making lately. When I wrote that post last year, it felt like the company was simply hiring a lot of big, established names. But now that it is more established, it is hiring more and more journalists who are early in their career.

Two: This is not a pro beat. This is not a beat that is located in one of the major, professional markets. It’s Syracuse. It’s part of a trend where the site is hiring reporters to cover major college sports outside of the pro cities in which it established itself early on.

Granted, Syracuse is major college sports.

But hiring a reporter to cover Syracuse sports, to be based in Syracuse, does actually move The Athletic one step closer to branches in smaller markets like Binghamton and Olean.

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ON PEDAGOGY: Thoughts on deadlines in classes

This tweet from Jenn Mallette crossed my feed the other day:

I think my soapbox for the semester is going to be pointing out ways the classroom is not the workplace and how super strict late policies harm students and undermine learning.

— Jenn Mallette (@jenniechris) August 29, 2019

As someone who teaches journalism and, as such, has some strict late policies, it would have been easy to react defensively on this tweet. Instead, it energized me. I love people who get me thinking more deeply about my pedagogical strategies. One of the worst things we can do as professors is blindly do things we’ve always done, or cling to our beliefs about how things should be. It doesn’t mean changing all the time, but we should have reasons for what we do and we should explain those reasons to our students.

So, my late policy in my journalism skills classes is this:

If an assignment is late, it automatically receives a failing grade.

This, on its face, looks like the kind of super strict late policy Jenn was tweeting about. I make no apologies for this. The fact is, my students are going to work in media in some form or fashion. Many of them are going to work in the news and sports media. Deadlines are a part of your daily life. I tell them on the first day of class, that if I ever missed a deadline as a reporter, I’d have been fired. If we view college as preparation for the workplace — especially in a discipline like journalism, which is much more of a pre-professional program than others on campus - then it is vital that students learn the importance of hitting deadlines.

So yes, if a student is late on an assignment, they receive a failing grade.

Harsh, right?

Well … there are caveats:

I give A LOT of assignments

In my skills classes, students do anywhere from 6-10 regular assignments. What this does is it lessens the impact of one bad grade on any one assignment. Blowing one deadline doesn’t mean you will fail the class. It, I hope, takes the pressure off each individual assignment.

Students are encouraged to turn in assignments late.

My grades are done on a number scale (students get an 85 on an assignment, not a B). I tell my students that if you are going to miss a deadline, don’t blow off the assignment. Turn it in anyway. It won’t pass. But it will get points. Getting a 50 on an assignment because it’s late is not good, but it is WAY better than the 0 that comes from not turning it at all. In terms of grading, again, this lessens the impact of missing a deadline on a student’s overall grade. There’s a consequence, but it is by no means dire.

More importantly, I want students to do the work. I want them to learn and understand that the value of the course doesn’t come from the grade they get but from the work they produce. Doing the assignment, learning the skills involved, getting practice — that’s what we’re here for.

Students are allowed to ask for extensions.

That anecdote I told earlier about how I’d get fired for missing a deadline? Yeah, that’s bull. The first time a baseball game goes into extra innings, you realize that even newspaper deadlines are not always strict.

The fact is, life happens. You get sick. A family member gets sick. Your car breaks down. A roommate has a breakdown and you need to be there with them. Your boss calls you in for three extra shifts. Sometimes, an assignment is hard and tricky and you can’t break it. Sometimes sources don’t call you back. Sometimes, life just overwhelms you.

So I tell my students that they are always allowed to ask for extensions.

Now, these extensions are granted at my discretion. If a student asks for one all the time, I’m going to be leery and have a conversation. But for the most part, I grant them. Again, the point is doing the work, not an artificial deadline I established at the start of the semester.

The lesson I want my students to learn is to communicate with their editors, their news directors. We like to fetishize the hard-ass boss in journalism, but the fact is that every time I had something come up in my life that made work challenging, every editor I had listened and was empathetic and did what they could to help. It was when I didn’t speak up, when I didn’t communicate, that problems would arise.

The point of deadlines in my class is to teach the students about being journalists in the real world.

But there is more to being a journalist than just hitting deadlines. There’s doing the work. There’s communicating. There’s empathy and understanding.

Which, I hope, is the place where my deadline policy comes from.