Good Journalistic Advice from the Howard 100 News Team

For those with satellite radio subscriptions who listen to the Howard Stern Show, the Howard 100 News team actually gives a solid piece of journalistic advice, albeit in a humorous fashion. The tag line they use in one of their promos is "If you mother says she loves you, check her sources."

While I take it on faith that my mother loves me, after all she is giving first hand testimony to that fact, when it comes to news-worthy leads, I check everything. Recently, for example, It was suggested that I write a news story about October 5th being the most popular birthday in the USA by the News Director of the Yahoo! Contributor Network. He generally provides me with pretty solid leads, sometimes offering me contact info. for specific news-worthy leads and suggesting article topics that he'd like to pitch to the Yahoo! News front page folks.

Sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't (and sometimes they require extraordinary effort on my part: "If you can find someone who was present at 'X' event 60 years ago, we'd like to publish an interview with them."). That's great, I am thankful and lucky to have such a good relationship with the person who decides whether to pay me for an article. I pursue the leads offered to the best of my ability whether I think they are likely to be profitable to me or not, often investing many hours in research before I really know whether there is a story there or not.

The October 5th birthday story was no different. I accepted the challenge and went to work, assuming that the premise was true. Indeed, at first it seemed that every web reference agreed. October 5th is the most popular date for birthdays in the USA because it coincides with a New Year's Eve conception, they said. Hmmm. I was born on October 2nd, which is certainly within the big part of the bell curve for those babies conceived on the same date as those born on October 5th. So I asked my mother, "Is it likely that I was conceived on New Year's Eve?"

"Yes," she replied that she was almost certain of that.

I noticed, however, that one source was cited by most of the websites and news stations which were reporting October 5th as the most popular birthday. Those that didn't cite a specific source had specific language or numbers that were too similar to those cited by that same, singular source to be coincidental.

Furthermore, the data upon which that original source based its claim was unavailable. It would have been easy to cite the same source used by such news outlets as NBC4-TV out of Washington, D.C., and all the others, but one source without the backing evidence just doesn't pass my standard of reliability even though that was the storyline requested by the News Director. So I asked myself, who might have actual birth record data and statistics? The government, for one. So I did a search restricted to .gov  sites and came up with the CDC data contained in my report which was inconclusive but tended to cast further doubt on the October 5th meme.

Looking further, I found a 2006 study by a Harvard professor who listed all 366 days of the year (including leap year's February 29th) in order of popularity, based on a study of many years of birth records. His data was more in line with the CDC data and was quite different than the source used by almost every website that talked about the most popular birthday in the U.S. I could have, and should have, gone one step further and called the Harvard professor who did the study and asked to see his data for a solid answer to the question, but by this time, my deadline was fast approaching and it didn't seem possible to make the contact and review the details of the study in time to publish the story at all.

With three sources in hand, but without the raw data to confirm their findings, I cannot say definitively upon which date the most popular birthday falls. I can say, however, that the October 5th date is pretty doubtful, and that's the story I went with. You can read it in its entirety at Yahoo! News by clicking the link below.

• Is October 5th Really the most Popular Birthday in the United States?

Reporting on 'hints and allegations'

Ideally, every news reporter would adopt a Joe Friday approach, "All we know are the facts, ma'am." There's a place for commentary and opinion, but news reporting isn't that place. A well-written news article should present the facts and let the reader form their own opinions. Unfortunately, in my opinion, that doesn't happen much anymore.

Separating fact from opinion in news reports

There are certain instances where a writer must be especially careful about blurring facts and opinions, whether the opinions belong to her or to someone else. Generally, those instances involve cases where what is said could be damaging to someone's (or some company's) reputation. We can write about allegations, accusations, convictions and indictments as facts, but not the underlying actions unless we were personally witness to them and would be willing to testify to them under oath in a court of law. For example, "When I arrived on the scene, the fight was still in progress and Joe Smith was alternately shoving and being shoved by Sam Jones." I saw it, I would attest to it under oath, I can write it.
However, if, when I arrived, Joe and Sam were in handcuffs, all five people I asked said they saw the two shoving each other and described the altercation in detail, a police officer told me they were being arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkenness and assault, and I heard Jones yell out, "Ness time I'll do more 'n jess shove you ta th' groun'," just before he vomitted onto the side of the police cruiser. I can not write a factual news article stating that Smith and Jones were shoving each other, that they were drunk, or anything about their specific actions (other than saying that Jones yelled out whatever I heard him yell).
I can write something like the following:

On Friday evening at approximately 11:45 p.m., the Rutland City Police arrested Joe Smith and Sam Jones outside of Notorious Nightclub on Main Street. The arresting officer, Detective Joe Friday, said the pair were being arrested for disorderly conduct, public drunkeness and assault.

Mike Jones, who said he was the brother of one of the accused, said "Sam wasn't doing nothing. Joe just walked up and hit him over the head with a beer bottle. Sam just turned around and pushed him away, you know, acting in self-defense." Four other bystanders, however, claimed to have seen Jones spit in Smith's face immediately prior to the altercation.

Bartenders could not say how many drinks were served to the pair prior to the trouble in the parking lot. Officers at the scene would not comment on the results of a breathalyzer test administered to Smith and Jones. 

John Baptiste, who was behind the bar at the time said that Jones had been asked to leave the premises on several previous occasions, but could not say why.

In this example, I am not reporting as fact anything I didn't see. Instead I am reporting that an officer told me this, four bystanders (whose names and phone numbers I jotted down for my file) told me that, and Mike Jones told me something else. In this case, I could testify that these people told me those things, but I can't say for certain whether any of what they said is actually true or not. I did not personally, in my article, accuse anyone of anything or make assumptions about anyne's guilt or innocence.

It would be entirely wrong to write: On Friday evening at approximately 11:45 p.m., Joe Smith and Sam Jones were carted away in handcuffs after brawling in the parking lot of Notorious Nightclub on Main Street. Jones, a known trouble-maker, started the fight by spitting in Smith's face. Smith retaliated by hitting the larger man in the head with a beer bottle, but was shoved to the ground and could have been in for much worse if police had not arrived to break up the fight. While the majority of onlookers provided consistent descriptions of the fight, Jones' brother Mike seemed to leave out key pieces of the story to protect his big brother. Both men were drunk when they left the club and even the bartenders lost track of how much alcohol the men had been served that evening. Notorious Nightclub lives up to its name as events like those of last night seem to happen on a regular basis there. Perhaps, if the hired help were trained well enough to recognize when someone has had enough to drink, they could keep their patrons out of jail.

In the latter example, I have personally accused two men, Smith and Jones, of specific criminal actions. I have make actionable statements against the management and staff of Notorious Nightclub, accused Mike Jones of lying, and personally accused Smith and Jones of being drunk. Both I and my publisher could be sued over each of these statements, since they are all based on hearsay or unsubstantiated assumptions and damaging to someone's reputation. I don't know if the two men were drunk, if Mike Jones was lying, or if the four other bystanders were cousins of Smith and were lying on his behalf. Any of them might have been mistaken. I have one bartender's assertion that Jones had been removed from Notorious on previous occasions, but have personally interpreted that by calling Jones a known trouble-maker, another potentially actionable allegation on my part. While I might be able to successfully defend against civil suits against some of these claims, if the results of the breathalyzer tests were admitted and showed the men over the legal limit, for example, my allegation of them being drunk might get dismissed, but some are indefensible - was Mike Jones lying or simply mistaken?

Let's assume several weeks go by. Jones died from a subdural hematoma the next day, Smith is going on trial for murder. I can say that Smith has been arraigned for murder, he is being tried for murder, he has been accused of murder by the prosecutor, but I cannot call him a murderer, or say that he killed Jones. I can say that the coroner stated that the autopsy revealed the cause of death was a blow to the head consistent with being struck by a beer bottle, as Smith was alleged to have done two days prior to the Jones' death.

If Smith is convicted of murder, I still cannot call him a murderer with absolute impunity. I can say he has been convicted of murder, found guilty of murder, or is serving a life sentence for murder, but if the conviction were overturned later, my calling him a murderer outright would be proven to be incorrect.

In short, a factual news article can report allegations or statements made by others who are cited in the text, but should never make claims, accusations, or assumptions about events to which the writer was not personally a witness.

Although personal allegations against individuals are the most common instances where this comes into play, it also applies in other areas. I can't say for sure, for example whether cell phones cause brain tumors or not. I can say that 17 independent studies have found no evidence that cell phones cause brain tumors or that Mike Jones, brother of Sam Jones who was  originally thought to have died of a subdural hematoma after being struck with a beer bottle, now claims that his brother's death was caused by a tumor triggered by his cellphone. "He never had no tumor before he got a cell phone," Jones shouted from the courthouse steps over the protests of his attorney.

The writer should let the reader know the source of every bit of information in the article that isn't widely known public knowledge. I don't need to provide a source for information like, "the President of the United States was born in Hawaii." If I wrote, however, "Hawaii remains the President's favorite vaction spot," I'd need to cite a source such as "he told Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Show last night."

Related blog post: Interviews

I just wanted to drop a quick note here that I have another blog called "Interviews with Experts." It is mainly dedicated to collecting all the interviews I have done with experts on various topics, but it also includes posts which discuss issues that have come up in the course of conducting interviews and my experiences around the interviews themselves. Since interviews are a key news data gathering tool, I am mentioning it here for those that are interested, but I'm generally not going to cross-post every entry from there to here.

Establishing credibility Part I

I remember when the evening television news anchor was the most trusted man in America. When Walter Cronkite said "...and that's the way it is," we knew that that was indeed, the way it is. It wasn't his opinion. It wasn't his spin, or his interpretation of the a situation. It was the News with a capital N and that meant facts, just the facts, and nothing but the facts.

Cronkite had that trust because he had developed a reputation and his credibility was beyond reproach. Honestly, that's the way I prefer my news. Give me the facts, and let me decide what I feel about the situation on my own. I don't need a triumvirate of morning show hosts to shake their heads and pass judgment on the news as if their opinion is more valid than that of anyone else.

Unfortunately, though, as Walter might have said that's the way it is these days. Commentary, opinion and facts are all ingredients in today's news recipe. Some recipes may call for more of one ingredient than the others. The net result, however, is that hardly any of us would volunteer the name of a modern day news anchor as the most trusted person in America these days.

As news writers, however, it is our jobs to present the news in a credible fashion. If the reader doesn't believe what we write, then we are wasting their time with our words. Simply saying something that's true doesn't always automatically translate into believability. As professional writers it is our jobs to choose words carefully. We can choose words for their emotional connotations, and that's fine, as long as we are also careful to use words and write with a credible voice, using solid logic applied to verifiable facts.

If I write that the most popular car color is red, I need to support and qualify that statement. Without that support it is not a credible statement and it detracts from any point I want to make in whatever I'm writing. After all, if I am caught in an error one time, the reader can only assume that the rest of my article is questionable as well.

To support the fact that the most popular car color is red, for example, There are several ways to go. I can remove my credibility from the equation altogether by attributing the statement to someone else. If I say "Joe Smith, the owner of Joe Smith's Fine Used Cars in Hoboken, New Jersey, told me that the most popular car color is red," then the reader can make a judgement about the validity of the information based upon their opinion of Joe Smith's credibility and his qualifications to make such as judgement.

Whatever the reader decides about Joe Smith, I, as the author, cannot be judged on the relative merit of that statement unless, in the rest of my article I assign it some credibility that differs from the reader's assumption. If I say "therefore, my recommendation for car companies to save money is to only make red cars because it is the most popular color," then I have added my reputation and credibility on top of Joe Smith's by personally validating his statement. Now again, my credibility is on the line with the reader.

Every fact or statement in a news piece either builds on the writer's credibility because it is explicitly sourced, or it relies on the credibility capital the writer has already built with the reader. A news writer's credibility balance sheet cannot go into negative territory or readers (and editors) will decide that your article has no real worth to them.

The Title as a Promise to the Reader

Whether in fiction or non-fiction, the title is a promise
to the reader that must be compelling enough to make the
reader choose your book off the shelf or click your article
from a search engine results page.
Photo by Brad Sylvester.

Titles of web news articles serve many purposes. They help increase search engine rankings, entice potential readers to click on them, and a host of other functions. At it's most fundamental level, however, a title is a promise, it is a personal commitment from the author to the reader (and to search engine algorithms) about the content of the full article.

As with any time that one person makes a promise to another, the author's reputation depends on whether or not that promise is kept. At a higher level, the website's reputation or rank with search engines also depends on whether that promise is kept.

Let me explain. Let's use a fictional title: "Killer Hiding Out at Bronx Zoo." That's an eye-catching title that might cause someone who sees the title to click on it to read more. Why will they want to read more or to ask another way, what has the author promised them with that title?

By clicking on the title and reading the full article, the reader expects to learn who or what the killer is, why the killer is at the Bronx Zoo, whether the killer is still there, if there is any ongoing danger, and the reader expects to be entertained by it all.

Entertained? Really? Yes. If the author were promising only straight information without entertainment, the title would be less... let's say, mysterious and playful. It might read "Deadly Egyptian Cobra Missing from Bronx Zoo." By using the word killer, which normally implies a person in this context, the author is saying "let's have some fun."

The facts can be delivered very quickly and succinctly, almost police blotter style and that's exactly what CNN has done with the above-lined title. In about 100 words they have delivered the facts, exactly as promised in their title. They tell you where the cobra is, how deadly it is, whether the public is at risk, and what steps are being taken by zoo staff to locate the snake. Furthermore, the CNN report even explains why it's called an Egyptian Cobra as the inclusion of that information might be inferred by a typical reader from their title. The CNN article delivers on the promise of the title and upon CNN's reputation.

With our title "Killer Hiding at Bronx Zoo," we've made a different promise which includes entertainment on top of the facts. Our title reads more like a murder mystery, and so should our article. "Officials on Sunday released a statement advising the public that a dangerous prisoner has escaped and is still at large. The escapee remains highly dangerous despite the fact that it is unarmed, and indeed, unlegged as well."

To keep our particular promise, we'll deliver all the facts, but describe the situation in the terminology and style of a crime drama. We might ask members of the public to report any sightings to the Bronx Zoo, giving out real contact information. We'll use original sources like statements from the Bronx Zoo, but we'll also use other sources that help us differentiate ourselves from the traditional news outlets. We might use the social media pages of the Bronx Zoo for updates and public comments so we can include original content like "While some Bronx Zoo Facebook fans like Nikola Marijana Bankovic expressed fear and vowed "We'll be staying away from the zoo until the snake is located,' others viewed the situation more humorously, 'Cobras eat rats,' noted New York resident Julie Charles, 'maybe it's headed to 85 Wall [Street].'" We might include a pencil drawing of the cobra mimicking the work of a police department's forensic sketch artist, or a wanted poster. [Note: check the TOS of the specific social media site to see if using other people's statements is allowed. A really good case could be made posts made to the fan pages of public entities (like the Bronx Zoo) have no expectation of privacy and are de facto public statements, but I'm not a lawyer so check into what's allowed for yourself. Ask the help desk of the particular social media site if you have a question and save the response.]
We are not going to outcompete traditional outlets like CNN or Reuters with simple restatements of facts, and that's not what Yahoo! News wants us to do. They have access to wire services and their own in-house news crews for that. Instead, they are looking for Y!CN writers to offer unique viewpoints, deeper background information, and original presentations on popular news topics.
That's not to say that we should always take a humorous approach. Serious topics demand a serious tone, but whatever promise we make with our title, it should be different than the promises made by every other news service. By making and keeping promise with every single piece of content we write, we'll not only build our own reputation with readers while developing our own style and voice, but we'll also be preserving our search engine rankings and news feeds.

What keyword density should I use?

Originally Associated Content told us to use 2-5% keyword density (or even 3-6% at one point). There was even a general town hall conducted with that advice. They suggested using bolded subheadings to get more keyword reiterations in without making the article sound awkward. That worked, and I did it for a while, but it often made the article difficult to read.

Using synonyms and words that are highly related to the topic works pretty well, too, and doesn't lead to the same sort of awkward constructions. Personally, I don't measure keyword density at all anymore, and I don't target keyword density as a goal at all. I focus on writing something that I would want to read. To me, that means that there is real content in the article, and it doesn't make my head hurt to read it.

Nothing ticks me off more than clicking an article titled something like "Obama Birth Certificate Update" and finding an article that says little more than:
"The Obama birth certificate is in the news again.
One of the top ten Google trends this morning was the Obama birth certificate as controversy continues to swirl around this topic. When first elected, many Obama opponents mounted a public information campaign to try to convince people that Obama was not eligible to be president because he could not produce the long form of the Obama Birth Certificate..." and so on, with absolutely no new information.

As a reader, I expect (or at least hope) to learn something new every time I read a news article. If I can't find something to give the reader in exchange for clicking my clever article title, then I don't write it. Even when I was chasing keywords, I tried to provide some useful content. This example of one of my early AC News articles (when I was using keyword density measures as requested by the AC news department) is still drawing good page views every month after more than two years: It is noticeably keyword heavy, but is still readable.

It scored well on Google search results when first published, but with all the keyword spam competition for the term since then it is nowhere near the top at present. So how are people still finding it? I can find incoming links from a number of quality medical information sites referencing my article. It is not drawing page views because of the keyword density, but because it provides solid, authoritatively sourced information.

In my opinion, the latter strategy will be more effective for news writers in driving both short and long term page views under the new model.

Writing a very high quality, short, targeted piece for the Yahoo! Contributor Network (Y!CN) is much more likely to get picked up by Yahoo! News. That is where we can score really big page views. I have seen a few articles there pick up about 300,000 page views in just a couple days, and many more articles that hit 75,000 to 100,000 or more from a number of Y!CN writers.

My most popular Yahoo! News article to date was not on Google Trends at all when I wrote it, although its main topic did appeared there later. (I'll discuss the sources I use for breaking news story ideas in another post on another day.) It was also linked and tweeted by The Drudge Report and a number of other popular sites, and given a featured position by Yahoo! News. It had more than 2900 Facebook shares, and hundreds of Tweets. That will likely NEVER happen with something like the Obama birth certificate article I described above.

I think the paradigm for attracting eyeballs to AC News (and now Y!CN) articles has shifted, and, in my opinion shifted for the better, with the popularity of social media platforms like Facebook, with the Yahoo! acquisition of Associated Content (AC), and again with Google's latest algorithm change. Consistent creation of really useful material (from a reader's viewpoint) results in more opportunities, especially under the Yahoo! regime. With the old keyword dense articles, I averaged something like 2500-3000/ article over my entire library when I was writing several such news articles each day. I made the top 100 writers for AC for the year 2008 with just six months of membership and a library of about 190 articles in total.

Having stopped chasing keywords and Google Trends and starting to concentrate on delivering consistently higher quality, I now have an assignment desk so full of recurring article requests for publication at Yahoo! News that each come with guaranteed upfront payments in excess of my average per article earnings for the old keyword heavy news articles. That's without a single page view, and without the various miscellaneous one-off requests that come through. For me, the math is pretty clear. In short, Yahoo! and Y!CN want higher quality news content with a much lesser (if any) focus on keyword density and, most importantly, they are willing to pay for it.

What does localization mean?

Some web news publishers, like Examiner.com and some assignments at the Yahoo! Contributor Network ask news writers to contribute localized news stories. If news happens in your home town, that's easy, but if you happen to live in a little backwater town where the biggest news is that the only gas station in town ran out of premium gasoline for three hours on Thursday, then it can be a challenge for those unfamiliar with other ways to localize news content.

Localization simply means to make the story particularly meaningful to readers in your community. Depending upon the assignment or Examiner title you have, that may be your city, county, state or even multi-state region. There are a myriad of ways to accomplish this task for almost any major national or international news story.

A simple way to add a local angle to a national news story is to ask yourself a series of questions:

Could it happen here? Why or why not?

How does it affect my community? This one is terribly broad - thinking just about the tsunami in Japan, it could include such topics as: Will any radiation reach us here? Is imported Japanese food safe to eat? Has business at a local Japanese restaurant dropped? Will it take longer to get the new iPad (due to lack of Japanese made semiconductors)? Will the local Nissan dealer/factory face supply issues?

Are any individuals in my community particularly affected? People with family in the affected area, exchange students from the area, local volunteers going to help, someone just returned a day before the event and avoided near disaster, someone who had been planning a future visit

Is there a local expert who can help my readers understand the issue? Professors at a local college with particular expertise about the event or local rescue workers/firemen/ police/ doctors talking about the nature of rescue efforts in the affected area, for example

Have local officials made any statements about the event? Are we prepared? Does this affect the future of nuclear power in our state? Are steps being taken to address potential safety issues? Did the local congressman express condolences?

Do I have any relevant personal experience related to this event? Has anything from your past given you special insight into the event? For example, "Running a small family farm in Biloxi, Miss., we have experienced any number of weather-related or other events that have hurt my yield, but the thought of our spinach, cows, or the very ground itself being contaminated with radiation from a nuclear plant dozens of miles away..."

Even localized sstories about national or global news events require good research on the original event. You should include early on in the article all the relevant facts about the event (from properly cited original sources as I mentioned yesterday) since this is the foundation upon which you'll build the local part of the story. In addition, you'll likely have research at the local level, finding and interviewing someone, local news broadcasts, or newspapers. Even off-line sources need to be cited.

The plus side of writing localized content is that it is much more likely to be a unique take on an event about which many, many articles have already been written. The down side is that it may not appeal to an audience as broad as a national news item without localization. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes, particularly compelling local stories can find a national audience.

In any case, always pay attention to the guidelines, ground rules, and other guidance provided by the publisher for whom the work is intended with regard to localization.