High School Journalism & News Literacy

711 lead stories, read one at a time

Two British journalism scholars, Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill, read 711 news stories published in November 2014. Each one was the lead story on a news page of one of ten British daily newspapers, from the Sun to the Times. Both researchers read every story and asked the same question of each: why did an editor put this one at the top of the page? They were testing a list of reasons, called news values, that they had first drawn up in 2001. Their list in turn updated a famous 1965 study by two Norwegian researchers, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, who had proposed twelve factors that decide which foreign events reach the news.

Here is part of what Harcup and O'Neill found. Bad news, meaning death, injury, defeat or loss, appeared in 442 of the 711 stories. Surprise appeared in 345. Entertainment, which covers show business, sport, animals and lighter human interest, appeared in 332. Stories about powerful people and institutions turned up in 216. The numbers add up to far more than 711, because most stories carried several values at once. That is the first thing to learn about news values: they are not a menu from which an editor picks one. They stack.

Then the researchers looked at a second set: the 25 stories from British news sites that people shared most on Facebook and Twitter in 2014. The order changed. Entertainment came first, in 17 of the 25. Stories about the powerful nearly vanished, with only 3 of 25. What editors put at the top of the page and what readers pass on to their friends overlap, but they are not the same list.

Ask a working journalist why something is news, and you may hear that they know it when they see it. Harcup and O'Neill open their paper with exactly that reply. This lesson replaces the gut feeling with reasons you can say out loud, test against a real audience and defend to an editor.

Key idea: News values are the reasons an event gets chosen as news. They can be named, counted and argued about, and most real stories carry several of them at once.

The problem: eight things happened this week

Below is one week at Lakeview High School, a school invented for this course. You edit its news site, and you have room for three stories at the top of the home page. Read the list and choose your three before you read on.

1. On Tuesday night the school board voted 5-2 to move the first bell from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. starting next August. Buses, practices and after-school jobs will all shift.
2. A water pipe burst over the weekend and flooded the gym. The floor will be replaced, and home basketball games move to the middle school for at least three weeks.
3. A senior, Priya Natarajan, was named one of 40 national finalists in a science competition for high school students.
4. The robotics club finished fifth of 38 teams at a regional tournament on Saturday.
5. Gloria Reyes, who has taught chemistry at Lakeview for 34 years, told her classes she will retire in June.
6. The cafeteria adds a salad bar on Monday.
7. The assistant principal emailed students to remind them that the dress code, unchanged since 2019, bans hats in class.
8. A photo spreading on social media seems to show a famous singer buying snacks at a gas station on the edge of town.

No answer key exists that every editor would sign. But some choices can be defended and some cannot, and the difference comes from the values each event carries for this particular audience.

The values editors weigh

Newsrooms and textbooks name news values in slightly different ways. The table uses the plain names most American newsrooms use, with the matching term from Harcup and O'Neill's 2017 list where one exists. Their updated list has fifteen values, including two that barely existed in 1965: shareability, the likelihood that people will pass a story on, and audio-visuals, meaning arresting photos, video, sound or graphics.

Two working terms go with the table. A news peg is the recent event or change that makes a story timely now: a vote, a deadline, a new number, an arrest, an announcement. And news judgment is the skill of weighing all these values for a particular audience on a particular day. Like any judgment, it improves with practice and with being asked to explain itself.

Working the problem

Take the eight events in turn, asking which values each one carries for Lakeview readers.

The start-time vote carries almost everything. Its impact is enormous: it changes the morning of every student, parent, teacher and bus driver. It is timely, since the vote was Tuesday. It has conflict, because two board members voted no, and your reader will want to know why. And it is useful: readers need to know what changes and when. This is your lead story, and its news peg is the vote.

The flooded gym has impact on athletes and fans, usefulness (where are the games now?), surprise and strong pictures. It belongs in your top three.

The science finalist carries surprise and magnitude, since only 40 students in the country reached that stage, plus human interest and good news. If you interview her before anyone else does, you add exclusivity. Third story.

The retirement is pure human interest, and many readers will care deeply. But its timeliness is weak, because nothing changes until June. It is a strong candidate for a profile in the spring, which is a feature rather than a top news story this week.

The robotics result is good, local news that deserves a short item, perhaps in a weekly roundup of clubs and teams. Fifth of 38 is solid, but it is not a first.

The salad bar is useful and low in impact: a brief of two or three sentences.

The hat reminder fails the most basic test. Ask: what changed? The rule is the same and so, as far as you know, is its enforcement. A reminder of an existing rule is not news. It becomes news the moment something changes: a crackdown, a new penalty, a petition, a vote to revise the code.

The celebrity photo carries celebrity and shareability, the very values Harcup and O'Neill found readers share most. But before news values come into it, there is a prior question: is the photo real? Who took it, when and where? It could be old, edited, or of someone else. You will learn to check in Module 3. Even if it is genuine, ask what it changes for your readers. The honest answer is probably nothing, which makes it a social post at most.

So a defensible top three is the vote, the flood and the finalist. Another editor could put Ms. Reyes in the top three because the whole school loves her, and that is a choice you can argue for. "I know it when I see it" cannot be argued with. "Her retirement matters more to our readers than a gym floor" can.

The point: Run every event through two questions: what changed, and for whom does it matter? Most weak story ideas fail the first question, and most bad rankings fail the second.

The same event, three audiences

Proximity and relevance are not properties of an event. They are relationships between an event and an audience. The Lakeview vote is the lead story on the school site, a short story inside the city newspaper and nothing at all on a national site. None of those editors is wrong. Each is serving a different group of readers.

An event crosses from local to national news when it shows something bigger than itself. In October 2019, California's governor signed Senate Bill 328, which barred most public high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m. from the 2022-23 school year and middle schools from starting before 8 a.m., with an exception for rural districts. Once a whole state had acted, one district's start-time vote became part of a national argument about sleep and school schedules, and national outlets had a reason to cover it.

That is why the first question an editor asks is not "Is this important?" but "Important to whom?" A student news site that writes as if its readers were a national audience will miss the stories only it can tell: the board vote, the flooded gym, the teacher who has taught chemistry to three decades of their neighbors.

What news values leave out

News values describe what editors do. They do not prove that what editors do is right, and Harcup and O'Neill say plainly that "no taxonomy can ever explain everything." Three problems are worth knowing from the start.

First, bad news dominates. In their sample, the Times, Mail, Mirror and Guardian each ran around six times as much bad news as good. A reader who takes in only the news may conclude that things are worse than they are.

Second, slow problems get missed. A rise in chronic absence at your school, or library hours shrinking a little every year, can matter more than a flooded gym but has no single day on which it happens. Part of a reporter's job is to find a peg for a slow story: a new report, a budget vote, a deadline, a number nobody has published before.

Third, shareability rewards strong emotion. Harcup and O'Neill quote a former Guardian web editor, Janine Gibson, who said the most shared stories tend to be "stuff that makes you laugh and stuff that makes you angry." A newsroom that chases shares alone will drift toward outrage and novelty.

The counterweight is a clear idea of what journalism is for. The Society of Professional Journalists, whose code of ethics you will study in Module 6, opens it by saying its members "believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy." In plain words: people need accurate information to run their own lives and communities. That is the real reason the start-time vote outranks the celebrity photo. It is not more fun. It is something your readers will have to live with, and some of them may want to speak at the next board meeting before the details are settled.

What matters here: News values explain how stories get chosen, including the habits that skew coverage. Your own judgment should start from what your audience needs to know, then use the values to argue for it.

News, opinion and paid content do different jobs

Everything on a news site is not news. Three kinds of content often sit side by side, and part of news literacy is asking which job a piece is doing.

• News reports what happened and what it means, with facts that have been checked and attributed to their sources. A news story about the start-time vote tells you the vote count, what changes and what each side said.
• Opinion argues for a view. An editorial (the publication's own unsigned view), a column, a review or a letter to the editor about the vote would say whether the change is wise. Module 5 covers how to write one.
• Paid content is there because someone paid for it: an advertisement, or "sponsored content" written to look like a story. A bus company's article about how easy the new schedule will be is advertising, however newsy it looks.

The SPJ code asks journalists to "label advocacy and commentary" and to "prominently label sponsored content." Notice the word prominently: a tiny gray "sponsored" tag that most readers miss does not meet that standard. As a reader, look for the label before you decide how much to trust what you are reading. As a journalist, make sure your own work always carries one.

Common misconceptions

• News is simply whatever is most important. Importance, which the table calls impact, is one value among several. A surprising, visual or shareable event can outrun an important but slow one. Knowing that lets you notice when importance has lost, and push back.
• If lots of people share it, it must be news. Shareability is a value newsrooms now weigh, but in Harcup and O'Neill's study the most shared stories leaned toward entertainment and away from the powerful. Sharing measures attention. It does not measure significance, and it says nothing about accuracy.
• Objective news involves no judgment. Every story that runs was chosen over others. Fairness comes from method, meaning checking facts, attributing them, giving people a chance to respond and being open about your choices, not from pretending no choices were made.

The short version

• News values are the reasons an event becomes news: timeliness, impact, proximity and relevance, prominence, conflict, surprise, human interest, usefulness, exclusivity and follow-up, with shareability and audio-visuals added in the digital age.
• Real stories carry several values at once. Harcup and O'Neill found bad news, surprise and entertainment the most common among 711 lead stories in 2014.
• Ask two questions of any idea: what changed, and for whom does it matter? A reminder of an unchanged rule is not news.
• The audience sets the weights. The same vote leads the school site, runs inside the city paper and is absent nationally until it shows something bigger.
• News values skew coverage toward bad news, novelty and outrage, and away from slow problems. Start from what your readers need to know.
• News, opinion and paid content do different jobs, and each should carry a clear label.

Sources

1. Harcup, T., and O'Neill, D. (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470-1488. Open access. White Rose Research Online.
2. Galtung, J., and Ruge, M. H. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64-91.
3. Society of Professional Journalists. (2014). SPJ Code of Ethics (revised September 6, 2014). SPJ.
4. CBS Sacramento. (2019, October 14). Governor Newsom agrees California middle and high schools need later start times. CBS News.

A profile that would not check out

In March 2017, the school board in Pittsburg, Kansas, hired a new head principal for Pittsburg High School, Amy Robertson. The school's student newspaper, the Booster Redux, planned the kind of story school papers run all the time: a profile to introduce the new principal to students and families. A profile is a story about one person, who they are, where they come from and what they plan to do. Profiles are usually friendly. They still have to be accurate, so the reporters started checking the basic facts of Robertson's career.

The basic facts kept slipping away. Her résumé listed a master's degree and a doctorate from Corllins University. When the students went looking for Corllins, they found a website that did not work. They found no business license in the university's name in the California city where Robertson had said she attended classes. They found articles describing Corllins as a diploma mill, a business that sells degrees without real coursework. The friendly profile turned into a different story.

Six students wrote it. All but one were juniors, aged 16 to 18. According to an account in the Columbia Journalism Review by the media-law scholar Jonathan Peters, who advised them, the reporting took about two weeks. They called government offices, searched databases, interviewed people and held conference calls across time zones. They wrote the roughly 1,600-word story over a couple of days in a shared Google Doc.

The point: The story began as a profile, not an investigation. It became an investigation only because the reporters checked facts that everyone else had assumed were true.

Claims and records

A résumé is a claim: a statement a person makes about themselves. A degree is a record, held by the university that granted it. Whether that university is legitimate is another record, held by the accrediting agencies that review colleges. Verification means moving from the claim to the records, and preferring records kept by someone other than the person making the claim.

The Pittsburg reporters followed exactly that path. They checked whether the university existed where it was said to be (the business license), whether it could be reached (the website), and what others had already found about it (published articles). Today a reporter in the same spot would also search the Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs, the U.S. Department of Education's public list of colleges accredited by agencies the department recognizes.

Why had no one caught this before the students did? Part of the answer came out afterward. The district's superintendent, Destry Brown, told the Associated Press that the district did not usually request official transcripts until after it made a hiring decision. So the people who hired Robertson had not yet seen the records, and the students had no reason to assume anyone had. An official title, a hiring committee or a printed résumé tells you that a claim was made. It does not tell you the claim was checked.

Remember: Ask of every important fact: who is the source of this, and what record held by someone else would confirm it?

Three rules that made the story stronger

Investigations at school carry risks that a story about the robotics club does not. Students were reporting on the person who would run their school. The Pittsburg staff followed three rules that made their work harder to dismiss.

Full names on the record. Early in the reporting, some people talked to the students informally and gave only first names. Under the paper's editorial rule, those sources could not be used that way. The students called them back and confirmed their full names and titles. A source who is named can be checked, and a reader can judge them. One of the writers, Maddie Baden, told Peters that the editors required "multiple sources" to back up each claim.

Stepping aside from a conflict of interest. The paper's adviser, Emily Smith, had served on the committee that recommended Robertson for the job. So she recused herself, which means she stepped out of the editing of this story. Other experienced journalists helped instead, including Eric Thomas of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, a former local editor named Andra Stefanoni, Peters, and Frank LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center. The SPJ Code of Ethics asks journalists to "avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived." Smith's recusal dealt with both kinds at once: she had a real stake in the outcome, and readers would have suspected one.

A real chance to respond. The SPJ code also asks journalists to "diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing." The students sought Robertson's response. She declined to answer their questions, saying, as the Associated Press later reported, that "their concerns are not based on facts." She told the Kansas City Star that she had received the degrees in 1994 and 2010 with "no issue." A fair story reports a response like that, because it is part of what happened, and it lets readers weigh both the evidence and the answer.

Why this matters: Each rule protects the reader and the reporter at once. Named sources can be checked. A recused editor cannot be accused of bias. A subject who was asked for a response cannot say they were ambushed.

Publication and what followed

The story ran on Friday, March 31, 2017. Professional news organizations picked it up within days: the Topeka Capital-Journal on Monday, the Kansas City Star the next day, and then the Associated Press and national outlets. On Tuesday night, April 4, the school board accepted Robertson's resignation. The district said that "in light of the issues that arose," she felt it was "in the best interest of the district" to resign.

Superintendent Brown had earlier called the concerns about her credentials "groundless." Afterward he praised the students: "I appreciate that our kids ask questions and don't just accept something because somebody told them." He said officials had been asking questions internally too, but that the students' public reporting "probably speeded that process," and that the district would likely change how it vetted new hires.

Two more facts matter for you. First, the adviser was clear about the goal: "They were not out to get anyone to resign or to get anyone fired." The aim was an accurate story about a public official, not a particular result. Second, the law was on the students' side. Kansas passed the Kansas Student Publications Act in 1992, and the Student Press Law Center counts it among the oldest of the state laws that protect student journalists from censorship by school officials. You will study those laws, now on the books in 18 states, in Module 7.

The reporting process in eight steps

Strip away the drama and the Pittsburg story follows the same steps as every story you will write in this course, including a 200-word brief about a food drive.

In short: Reporting is a process, not a talent. Each step has a job, and skipping one is how stories go wrong.

Your first story: the news brief

A news brief is the smallest complete news story: usually 100 to 250 words reporting one event. It answers the basic questions (who, what, when, where, why and how), names its sources, and stops. Briefs are where most reporters start, because they teach the habits everything else depends on: getting names and numbers exactly right, attributing information, and putting the most important fact first.

Here is the opening of a model brief written for this course about an invented school, with notes on what each part does.

Lakeview High School students donated 1,312 cans and boxes of food in a two-week drive that ended Friday, more than twice the student council's goal of 600, council president Marcus Webb said.

Who (students), what (1,312 items), when (ended Friday), where (Lakeview High School), and a detail that tells you whether it is a lot (twice the goal). The number is attributed, which means the sentence says who it came from: the council president.

The food goes to the Eastside Community Pantry, which serves about 220 families a week, according to its director, Janet Ortiz. "Our shelves were close to empty after the summer," Ortiz said in a phone interview.

Why it matters, from a second source who is not part of the school. Her quote adds something only she could say. The phrase "in a phone interview" tells readers how the reporter got it.

The full model brief, along with a plan and a checklist, is in this lesson's reporting assignment below.

Reporting safely

Every module in this course ends with a story you report yourself. These rules apply to all of them.

• Interview people in public places such as the school library, a classroom with a teacher nearby, or a café, or else by phone or video call. Make sure a trusted adult, such as a parent, guardian or your adviser, knows who you are interviewing, where and when.
• Ask permission before you photograph or record anyone, and get clear permission before photographing or recording other minors. Follow your school's rules on recording and photography.
• Never go onto private property without permission, never follow anyone, and never confront anyone. If a person refuses to talk to you, note that you asked and move on.
• If reporting a story would put you or anyone else at risk, stop and talk to an adult you trust. No story is worth that.

Common misconceptions

• A friendly profile does not need fact-checking. The Pittsburg investigation started as exactly that kind of profile. Every fact in every story needs checking, and friendly stories are where unchecked claims slip through.
• If someone was hired for an important job, their credentials must have been checked. Pittsburg's district did not normally request official transcripts until after hiring. A job title tells you a decision was made, not what was verified.
• High school reporters cannot investigate adults at their own school. They can and do, and in Kansas the law protected them. How far the law protects student journalists depends on the state and the school, which Module 7 covers. Good reporting habits protect them everywhere.
• Reporting fairly means printing both sides at equal length. Fairness means giving the person criticized a real chance to respond and reporting that response accurately. It does not mean pretending the evidence is evenly balanced when it is not.

What to carry forward

• The Pittsburg story began as a routine profile and became an investigation because the reporters checked what others had assumed.
• A claim is not a record. Verify important facts against records held by someone other than the person making the claim.
• Three fairness rules made the story stronger: full names on the record, a recused adviser who had a conflict of interest, and a real chance for the subject to respond.
• Reporting follows steps: idea, questions, plan, gathering, verification, response, writing and editing, and publishing with follow-up.
• A news brief answers who, what, when, where, why and how in 100 to 250 words, with every fact attributed.
• Report safely: public places or calls, an adult who knows, permission before photos or recordings, and no trespassing or confrontations.

Sources

1. Peters, J. (2017, April 6). How Kansas high school journalists exposed a principal's puffed-up resume. Columbia Journalism Review. CJR.
2. Associated Press. (2017, April 5). Principal resigns after student reporters investigate her credentials. CBS News. CBS News.
3. Younker, E. (2017, April 6). Kansas high school students uncover discrepancies; new principal resigns. CNHI News, via The News Courier. The News Courier.
4. Hoyt, J. (2017, April 6). Booster Redux stories. Student Press Law Center. SPLC.
5. Society of Professional Journalists. (2014). SPJ Code of Ethics. SPJ.

A directory on a library shelf

Every year the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston published a directory listing each of its priests and where he served. In 2001, the Boston Globe's investigative unit, the Spotlight team, began reading those directories line by line. Most entries named a parish. Some did not. Priests who had been pulled from their posts appeared under other labels, such as "sick leave," "awaiting assignment" and "unassigned."

The reporters typed nearly two decades of listings into a spreadsheet. In a typical year in the mid-1980s, they found about two dozen priests in those categories, out of more than 1,000. By the mid-1990s the number was over 100. The team's editor, Walter V. Robinson, later wrote in Nieman Reports that the directories had served as a roadmap. They proved nothing by themselves. They were leads: names to check against court files and interviews.

The court files were the second document trail, and getting them took a lawsuit. Church records in a case against one priest, John Geoghan, were sealed, which means a court had ordered them kept from the public. At the request of the Globe's editor, Martin Baron, the paper's lawyer, Jonathan Albano, asked a judge to lift the seal. He argued the motion on September 6, 2001, before Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney. In November 2001 she lifted it. The first story ran on January 6, 2002, under the headline "Church allowed abuse by priest for years." More than 900 stories followed, and the Globe won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

The Globe had sources inside the story: victims, lawyers, former priests. But the reporting rested on documents anyone could have read, plus court records that the law said belonged to the public.

What matters here: Many of the most important stories start in documents that are already public. A directory, an agenda or an inspection report becomes news when a reporter reads it carefully and asks what the patterns mean.

Four kinds of sources

Every fact in a story comes from one of four places. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and good reporting uses them to check one another.

The strongest stories confirm a fact through more than one kind. If the food service director says the lunch line takes ten minutes, your stopwatch on three different days either backs her up or gives you a better question to ask.

Beats: covering one part of the world on purpose

A beat is an area that a reporter covers regularly: the school board, athletics, the arts, clubs, transportation, food service, city hall. Reporters on a beat find stories that a reporter who drops in once never will, because they know the people, the documents and the calendar. They notice when something changes.

To build a beat, make three lists and keep them current:

• People: who makes decisions, who carries them out, and who is affected. Include their titles, how they prefer to be contacted, and their assistants.
• Documents: what gets written down on this beat and where it is kept. For a school board beat that means agendas posted before each meeting, minutes approved afterward, the annual budget and the policy manual.
• Dates: the meetings, deadlines, seasons and anniversaries coming up. Reporters call this a tickler file, a running list of future dates that might produce stories.

Then check in on a schedule. A ten-minute conversation with the athletic director every other Monday will produce more stories than one long interview a semester.

Public records: what the law lets anyone see

The federal Freedom of Information Act, signed in 1966 and in effect since 1967, gives the public a right to request records from federal agencies, subject to nine exemptions. Generally any person can make a request, citizen or not. But FOIA covers federal agencies only. Your school district, city and county are covered by your state's own public records law and open meetings law. Every state has both, and they differ in what they cover, how fast agencies must respond and what they may charge. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press keeps a state-by-state guide to them.

For a student reporter, the most useful public records are usually close at hand:

• School board agendas, minutes and recordings of meetings. Open meetings laws generally require boards to meet in public with advance notice, with limited exceptions for closed sessions on matters such as personnel and legal advice.
• Budgets and spending: what the district plans to spend and what it actually spent.
• Policies, from the dress code to the rules for student media.
• Inspection reports. Federal rules for the National School Lunch Program require each school to obtain at least two food safety inspections a year from a state or local agency, to post a report of the most recent inspection "in a publicly visible location," and to give a copy to any member of the public who asks.

Some records are closed. Student education records, such as another student's grades or discipline file, are protected by a federal privacy law called FERPA, and a school will not release them. Personnel files and legal advice are often exempt too. When an agency withholds something, ask which exemption it is using and get the answer in writing.

Worked example: the cafeteria inspection

Here is the whole procedure on one story idea, at Lakeview High School, the invented school from Lesson 1.

Step 1. Turn the topic into a question. A post spreading among students claims the cafeteria "failed its health inspection." That is a rumor, not a story. Your question is narrower and answerable: what did the cafeteria's most recent food safety inspections find?

Step 2. Ask what would have to be true for each possible story. If it failed, there will be a report with violations on it, a date and an inspector's name. If it passed, there will be a report saying so.

Step 3. Map the sources. Documents: the posted report, the copy the school must give on request, and the city or county health department's own inspection records. People: the food service director, the cafeteria manager and a health department spokesperson who can explain the terms on the report. Observation: where the report is posted, and whether students can see it. Data: the dates and number of inspections this year.

Step 4. Get the record. Ask in person first: "May I see the most recent food safety inspection report?" Cite the federal rule if you need to. If you are refused, put the request in writing. The Student Press Law Center offers a free letter generator that fills in your state's public records law and the response deadline it sets.

Step 5. Read the record slowly. Note the date, the inspector, each violation and whether it was corrected on the spot, and whether a follow-up inspection was scheduled. If a term is unclear, call the health department and ask what it means rather than guessing.

Step 6. Interview with the record in hand. Ask the food service director about each violation: what happened and what changed. You are now asking about facts, not rumors, and the answers will be specific.

Step 7. Write. Suppose the report, dated October 3, lists two violations: a refrigerator running four degrees too warm and a hand sink blocked by a cart. Both were corrected during the inspection, and the follow-up visit found no problems. Your lede might read: "Lakeview High School's cafeteria was cited for two food safety violations in an October 3 inspection, both corrected the same day, according to the county health department's report."

Run it again: the record says something else

Now change one input. You get the report, and it shows the cafeteria passed both of this year's inspections with no violations at all. Then you learn that the video behind the rumor was filmed in a different district's kitchen.

The story has flipped, and that is a success, not a failure. Your reporting found the truth. Whether you publish depends on news value. If half the school has seen the rumor, a short story that sets the record straight is useful, timely and relevant: "Despite a widely shared post, Lakeview's cafeteria passed both of its food safety inspections this year with no violations, according to reports from the county health department." If almost no one has heard the rumor, publishing it would only spread it, and the right call may be no story at all.

Change a different input. Suppose the school refuses to show you the report. Your plan does not end there. The health department that did the inspection keeps its own copy, and your written request starts the legal clock in your state. Note every request and refusal, with dates, because the way an agency handles a simple request can itself become part of the story.

The upshot: A reporting plan is a set of questions and the sources that can answer them. When the records point somewhere unexpected, you follow the records, not your first idea of the story.

Writing a records request

A good request is short, specific and polite. Here is a model:

Dear Ms. Alvarez: Under [name of your state's public records law], I request a copy of the two most recent food safety inspection reports for the cafeteria at Lakeview High School, 400 Lake Road. Electronic copies by email are fine. If there is a fee, please tell me the amount before you fill the request. If you withhold any part of a record, please cite the specific exemption in writing. Thank you. Jordan Lee, reporter, the Lakeview Ledger, (555) 555-0142.

Notice what it does not include. It does not explain the story you plan to write, and it does not promise anything about how the records will be used. It names the records, the law and the format, and it asks for reasons in writing if anything is withheld. Keep a log of every request: what you asked for, from whom, on what date, and every reply.

Common misconceptions

• Public records are for professional reporters and lawyers. The federal law lets generally any person request records, and student journalists use state public records laws all the time. A school district is a government body.
• If a record is public, the school has to hand it over on the spot. Laws give agencies a set time to respond and allow some exemptions. Ask nicely first, then put it in writing and keep a log.
• A document settles the story. Documents can be incomplete, out of date or misleading. The Spotlight team treated its directories as leads to check, not as proof.
• FOIA is the law to cite for anything government. FOIA covers federal agencies. For your school district or town, cite your state's public records law.

Putting it together

• The Spotlight investigation rested on documents: annual church directories read line by line, and sealed court records that the Globe went to court to open.
• Facts come from four kinds of sources: people, documents, data and observation. Use them to check one another.
• A beat is a part of the world you cover on purpose, with lists of its people, its documents and its dates.
• FOIA covers federal agencies. State public records and open meetings laws cover school districts, cities and counties.
• Useful school records include board agendas and minutes, budgets, policies and the cafeteria inspection report that federal rules require schools to post.
• A reporting plan is a set of questions and sources. When the records point somewhere new, follow them, and remember that disproving a rumor is a result too.

Sources

1. Robinson, W. V. (2003, March 15). Shining the Globe's Spotlight on the Catholic Church. Nieman Reports. Nieman Reports.
2. National School Lunch Program: Requirements for participation, food safety, 7 C.F.R. 210.13(b). Legal Information Institute.
3. U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). What is FOIA? FOIA.gov. FOIA.gov.
4. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. (n.d.). Open Government Guide. RCFP.
5. Student Press Law Center. (n.d.). Public records letter generator. SPLC.

Seven minutes with the athletic director

At 3:15 on a Monday, a student reporter named Sam knocked on the office door of Dale Brennan, the athletic director at Lakeview High School, the invented school from Lesson 1. The gym had flooded over the weekend. Sam had a phone, a notebook and no plan. Here is the whole interview, written for this course, with the lines numbered.

1. SAM: So the gym flooded, right?
2. BRENNAN: Yes. A pipe burst on Saturday.
3. SAM: That must have been really bad, wasn't it?
4. BRENNAN: It wasn't great.
5. SAM: Will the games move to the middle school, and will it cost a lot, and when will the floor be fixed?
6. BRENNAN: Games move to the middle school starting Tuesday. The floor, we're hoping mid-February, but the insurance adjuster hasn't been out yet, so honestly it could be March. Off the record, the boiler room has leaked before.
7. SAM: Okay. Do you like the middle school gym?
8. BRENNAN: It's fine.
9. SAM: Cool. Thanks, that's all I need.

And here is the opening of the story Sam filed that night:

The gym flooded when a pipe burst Saturday, and the floor will be fixed by mid-February, said Coach Brennan. "It was really bad," he said. Officials said the boiler room has leaked before.

Three sentences, and at least five problems. Some are weak craft. Two are serious ethical failures. This lesson traces each one back to the moment in the interview where it began, then rebuilds the interview so it cannot happen again.

Tracing the errors

Line 1: a question that can only confirm. "So the gym flooded, right?" is a closed question, one that can be answered yes or no. Sam already knew the answer, so the question produced nothing new. An open question asks for an account: "Walk me through what happened on Saturday." Open questions usually begin with how, why, what happened or tell me about.

Line 3: a question that answers itself. "That must have been really bad, wasn't it?" is a leading question. It suggests the answer the reporter wants. Brennan declined the invitation: "It wasn't great." But look at the story. "It was really bad," it says, in quotation marks, attributed to Brennan. He never said those words. Sam did. Putting your own words inside quotation marks and attributing them to someone else is a fabricated quote, and it is one of the most serious errors a journalist can make. Quotation marks promise the reader that these are the speaker's exact words.

Line 5: three questions in one breath. A double or triple question lets the source pick the easiest part. Brennan answered the first and third parts and skipped the cost entirely, and Sam never noticed. Ask one question at a time.

Line 6: the news, missed. The most important sentence in the interview is "the insurance adjuster hasn't been out yet, so honestly it could be March." That is the real story for every athlete and fan: the date is uncertain, and why. Sam did not follow up. Good follow-ups were waiting: When is the adjuster coming? What happens to the season if the floor is not ready? Then the story turned Brennan's hope into a promise: "will be fixed by mid-February." That misstates what he said.

Line 6 again: ground rules after the fact. Brennan said "off the record" after he had already given the information, and Sam said nothing. Then the story published it anyway, attributed to vague "officials." Either Sam broke an agreement, or there was never a clear agreement to break, and both are bad. Ground rules are set before the information is given, and if a source tries to set them afterward, you settle it on the spot. You will see how below.

Lines 7 and 9: a wasted question and no ending. Whether Brennan likes the middle school gym helps no reader. And Sam left without asking Brennan to spell his name or give his exact title. Is he "Coach Brennan"? His title is athletic director. The story got it wrong because no one asked.

Remember: Most interview errors are planted during the interview and only become visible in the story. The fix is not better writing. It is better questions, asked one at a time, with the ground rules settled first.

Before: prepare

Preparation is most of an interview. Before you sit down:

• Learn what is already known. Read what has been published, check the school website, and find any document involved, such as a work order, an agenda or a schedule.
• Write down what you need to know, then turn each need into a question. Prepare about ten and star the five you cannot leave without.
• Order them from easy to hard. Start with questions that let the person explain their work, and save the difficult ones for when you have built some trust, but do not run out of time before you ask them.
• Arrange the logistics: a public place, a phone call or a video call, with a trusted adult aware of who, where and when. Ask how much time the person has.

During: questions that open people up

Four follow-ups work in almost any interview: "What do you mean by that?" "Can you give me an example?" "How do you know?" and "What happened next?" And one technique costs nothing: silence. After an answer, wait two or three seconds before speaking. People often fill a pause with the most interesting thing they say.

Before you leave, ask four closing questions every time. Could you spell your name, and what is your exact title? Is there anything I should have asked and didn't? Who else should I talk to? May I contact you if I have a question while I am writing?

Ground rules: on the record, off the record, background

The terms that govern how you may use what a source tells you are called ground rules. The News Literacy Project summarizes the Associated Press's definitions this way:

• On the record: the information can be used, and the source can be quoted by name.
• Off the record: the information cannot be published, though the reporter can use it to look for confirmation elsewhere.
• On background: the information can be published under terms negotiated with the source, usually without the name but with a description of the source's position.
• Deep background: the information can be used, but the source is not identified in any way.

Other newsrooms define these terms differently, and many people use "off the record" loosely when they mean something else. So when a source uses the phrase, ask what they mean. Assume every interview is on the record unless you agree otherwise, and agree before the information is given. The SPJ code tells journalists to "be cautious when making promises, but keep the promises they make."

So what should Sam have said at line 6? Something like this: "You've just told me something I'd like to use. I can't treat it as off the record after you've said it, but can we talk about how I could report it?" Then Sam could pursue the leaks through records, such as the district's maintenance work orders, which are often public, and attribute the fact to the documents. Whether to use an unnamed source at all is one of the hard calls in Module 6.

Why this matters: Ground rules are a deal between you and a source. Settle the deal before the information changes hands, write it in your notes, and keep it.

Recording and notes

A recording protects you and your source: it settles any argument about what was said. The law on recording differs by state. Federal law, and most states, require only one person in a conversation to consent to recording, and that person can be you. But the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press counts about 11 states that primarily require all parties to consent: California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan (at least for recordings by someone outside the conversation), Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. For calls between states, the Committee advises assuming the stricter law applies.

The simple rule for this course is stricter than any state's: always ask, and get the answer on the recording. "I'd like to record so I get your words right. Is that okay?" Also follow your school's rules on recording.

Take notes even when you record. Phones die and files get lost. Mark exact quotes in your notes with quotation marks and paraphrases without them, so you never later confuse the two. Type up your notes the same day, while you can still read your handwriting and remember the context.

After the interview, you may read a quote or a fact back to a source to make sure you have it right. You should not send the source your draft. The Journalism Education Association's guidance is direct: "Sources do not have the right to review materials prior to publication." NPR's ethics handbook draws the same line, allowing reporters to read back a quotation but not to preview scripts. If a source says a quote is wrong, check your notes and recording. If you were right, the quote stands, even if the source now wishes they had said it differently.

Interviewing other students

Many of your sources will be minors, meaning anyone under 18 in most states. The JEA's guidance says that all sources "deserve to be treated with respect and dignity," and that minors raise special legal and ethical questions. It tells student reporters to ask sources their age during each interview and to know their state's laws on publishing information about minors. When a student shares something private or deeply personal, such as a health condition or a family crisis, the JEA recommends getting consent in writing or on a recording, and, if a minor may not understand the consequences of being named, getting documented consent from a parent or guardian too.

Explain to every student source how their words will be used and where the story will appear. Never pressure anyone to talk. Students are not public officials, and a quote that seems harmless today can follow a 15-year-old for years once it is online.

The interview, rebuilt

Here is how Sam's opening could read after a prepared interview with clear ground rules:

Lakeview's home basketball games will be played at Central Middle School at least until mid-February, and possibly into March, while the flooded gym floor is replaced, athletic director Dale Brennan said Monday. "We're hoping for mid-February, but the insurance adjuster hasn't been out yet, so honestly it could be March," Brennan said. District maintenance records show two earlier leaks in the boiler room next to the gym, in 2021 and 2023.

Every fact is attributed. The quote is exact. The uncertainty is reported as uncertainty. And the boiler-room history comes from records, not from a broken promise.

Common misconceptions

• A source can make anything off the record by saying so afterward. Ground rules are agreed before the information is given. If a source tries to change them afterward, settle it on the spot rather than ignoring it.
• Cleaning up a quote so it sounds better is harmless. Quotation marks promise the speaker's exact words. If a quote needs fixing, paraphrase it without quotation marks.
• Sending sources your draft is the most accurate approach. Reading back facts and quotes is fine. Showing a draft hands the source control over your story and, in student media, is often a form of prior review.
• If I record, I don't need notes. Recordings fail. Notes taken during the interview, plus the recording, protect you twice.

Where this leaves us

• Sam's errors began in the interview: a closed question, a leading question, a triple question, a missed follow-up, ground rules left unsettled and no spelling check.
• Prepare: learn what is known, write about ten questions, order them easy to hard, and arrange a safe setting.
• Ask open, neutral questions one at a time; follow up on the newsiest answer; use silence; end with the four closing questions.
• On the record, off the record, background and deep background are deals. Settle them before the information is given, and keep them.
• About 11 states primarily require everyone's consent to record. Ask permission on the recording every time, and take notes anyway.
• Read back facts and quotes if you need to, but do not share drafts. Treat student sources with extra care and document consent for private information.

Sources

1. News Literacy Project. (2018, September 12). Evaluating unnamed sources in news reports. News Literacy Project.
2. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. (n.d.). Introduction to the Reporter's Recording Guide. RCFP.
3. Bowen, J. (2015, April 7). Allowing sources to preview content before publication. Journalism Education Association, Scholastic Press Rights Commission. JEA.
4. Bowen, J. (2015, April 7). Treatment of minors; and (2010, August 3). Getting source consent when handling sensitive issues. Journalism Education Association. JEA.
5. Memmott, M. (2014, September 5). Showing stories to sources? This reporter did; we don't. NPR. NPR.

Eight seconds on a landing page

A professional fact-checker, identified in the study only as Checker C, opened a website and spent eight seconds on its home page. Then he left. "The first thing I would do is see if I can find anything on the organization," he said, typing its name into a search engine. The site belonged to the American College of Pediatricians, and it featured an article about bullying at school. Checker C clicked the group's Wikipedia entry and read that it is a "socially conservative association of pediatricians," founded in 2002 in protest against the larger American Academy of Pediatrics' support for adoption by gay couples. Only after a full minute and twenty seconds did he return to the bullying article. In under two minutes he had an accurate verdict on the article and on the whole site.

Checker C was one of 45 experienced internet users studied by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew of the Stanford History Education Group, whose Civic Online Reasoning lessons are now offered free by the Digital Inquiry Group, an organization founded by the same researchers: 10 professional fact-checkers, 10 historians with doctorates, and 25 Stanford undergraduates. One task asked each of them to compare two articles about bullying. One came from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the field's largest professional body, with 66,000 members and the flagship journal Pediatrics. The other came from the American College of Pediatricians, the much smaller group Checker C looked up.

Every fact-checker judged the Academy's site more reliable. The historians often decided that both were reliable. Sixty percent of the students chose the College. By the end of ten minutes, only three of the 25 students had worked out how the two organizations differed, and nine had never left the College's site at all.

These were not careless readers. The historians are experts at judging sources, and the students were among the most selective admissions in the country. They lost because they read the wrong way.

Why this matters: Judging a source is a skill with a method, not a matter of intelligence or education. The method can be learned in an afternoon, and it starts with leaving the page.

Two ways to read a website

Wineburg and McGrew describe two ways of evaluating a site. The historians and students mostly read vertically: they stayed on the page, scrolled up and down, and studied its features. The fact-checkers read laterally: they left almost at once and opened new browser tabs, across the screen, to find out what other sources said about the site.

Read down the right-hand column and notice what lateral reading does not require. It does not require knowing anything about pediatrics or bullying. It requires knowing that a website's own account of itself is the least independent evidence there is.

Three habits of fact-checkers

The researchers named three habits that let the fact-checkers, in their words, "read less but learn more."

• Taking bearings. The term comes from navigation. Before diving into unfamiliar content, the fact-checkers made a plan: what is this, and who is behind it?
• Lateral reading. Leaving the site after a quick scan and opening new tabs to judge it from the outside.
• Click restraint. Before clicking any search result, they scanned the whole first page of results, and sometimes the second and third, to understand what kind of sources had come up. Students, and sometimes historians, often clicked one of the first few results without saying why.

Notice where Checker C went first: Wikipedia. Teachers often ban it as a source, and you should not cite an encyclopedia as the final word in a story. But as a first stop to learn who an organization is, with links to the sources behind each claim, it is exactly what professionals use.

The national picture

In 2018 and 2019 the same research group gave six online tasks to 3,446 high school students whose demographics matched those of U.S. high school students, each with a live internet connection. Students struggled on all six. Ninety-six percent never learned that a website claiming to "disseminate factual reports" on climate science had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two-thirds could not tell news stories from advertisements on a popular website's home page. And over half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, actually shot in Russia, was "strong evidence" of voter fraud in the United States.

The researchers found that students were fooled by what they called weak signs of credibility: a website's look, its domain name, the content on its About page, and the sheer amount of information it offered. Every one of those signals can be bought or faked. A professional design costs a few hundred dollars, and anyone can register a .org address.

An earlier study by the group, in 2016, found that more than 80 percent of middle school students believed a native advertisement, labeled "sponsored content," was a real news story. Some noticed the label and still believed it.

Who is behind it? Two examples from opposite directions

Advocacy groups of every political leaning give themselves neutral-sounding names, and the Stanford researchers tested students on examples from both directions.

One task used a site called minimumwage.com, which argues against raising the minimum wage. It is run by the Employment Policies Institute. Neither site discloses, the researchers found, that both are the work of Berman and Company, a public relations firm in Washington that lobbies for the restaurant and hotel industries. A simple search for the institute's name and the word "funding" turns this up. In the 2016 study, 93 percent of college students failed to find it.

Another task showed students a tweet from MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group, saying new polling showed the National Rifle Association was out of touch with gun owners. It linked to a release from the poll's sponsor, the Center for American Progress, another liberal advocacy group, and the poll had been conducted by Public Policy Polling, a professional firm. A strong answer, the researchers said, would note both things: a professional poll can be useful, and both groups support stronger gun laws, which may have shaped how the poll was designed and presented. Fewer than a third of the college students who tried the task explained the groups' agendas fully.

The point of both examples is the same. You are not deciding whether you agree with a group. You are finding out who it is, so you can weigh what it says the way you would weigh a statement from anyone with a stake in the answer.

SIFT: four moves for any claim

Mike Caulfield, a researcher who works on digital literacy, turned the fact-checkers' habits into four moves he calls SIFT.

1. Stop. Before you read closely or share, ask whether you know what this is and who published it. A strong emotional reaction to a post is a good reason to stop.
2. Investigate the source. Take a minute to learn who is behind it, from outside sources. Caulfield's point is that "knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say."
3. Find better coverage. Search for the claim itself and see whether trusted reporting or experts confirm it. Sometimes you do not need to evaluate the original at all, because a better source has already done the work.
4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context. Follow a statistic to the study it came from, a quote to the full speech, a photo to its first publication, and check whether the version you saw was accurate.

In short: Stop, check who is behind it, look for better coverage, and trace the claim to where it began. Most bad information fails one of those four moves within two minutes.

SIFT, worked on one post

Here is an invented post of the kind you will meet: an account called Healthy Teen Facts shares a graphic saying, "New study: teens who use phones in bed sleep 2 hours less!" It has 40,000 shares.

Stop. Two hours is a dramatic number, and the post gives no study title, author or journal. You do not know what this is yet.

Investigate the source. A search for the account's name shows that it links to an online store selling sleep supplements. That does not make the claim false, but the account has a commercial reason to make the problem sound large.

Find better coverage. A search for "teens phones bed sleep study" turns up news coverage of a real study published a few weeks earlier, which you can read about in outlets that link to the original.

Trace. In the study itself you find that teens who used phones in bed slept, on average, about 20 minutes less, not two hours, and that the researchers say they found an association, not proof that phones caused the difference. The post took a real study and inflated its finding sixfold.

That is a fact-check, and the reporting assignment at the end of this module asks you to write one.

Common misconceptions

• A .org address means a site is nonprofit and trustworthy. Anyone can register a .org domain. Domain names were among the weak signals that fooled students in the national study.
• The About page tells you who runs a site. The About page is the organization describing itself. Neither minimumwage.com nor the Employment Policies Institute disclosed the PR firm behind them.
• A site with lots of citations and statistics must be reliable. The quantity of information was another weak signal. Check who is citing, and whether the citations say what the site claims.
• Wikipedia is useless for research. It is not a source to cite as the last word, but it is an excellent first stop for learning who an organization is, and professional fact-checkers use it that way.
• News literacy means knowing which outlets are biased. The method works on any source, including ones you agree with. The MoveOn and minimumwage.com examples come from opposite sides for a reason.

What you now know

• In Wineburg and McGrew's study, every fact-checker identified the more reliable pediatrics site; 60 percent of Stanford students picked the other one.
• Fact-checkers read laterally: they leave a site quickly and learn about it from other sources. They also take bearings and practice click restraint.
• In a national sample of 3,446 high school students, most were fooled by a site's look, domain, About page and amount of information, all of which can be faked.
• Advocacy groups on every side use neutral-sounding names. Find out who is behind a source and who pays, then weigh what it says.
• SIFT: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Sources

1. Wineburg, S., and McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1-40. Stanford Digital Repository.
2. Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., and Saavedra, A. (2021). Students' civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 50(8), 505-515. Stanford Digital Repository.
3. Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., and Ortega, T. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Stanford History Education Group. Stanford Digital Repository.
4. Caulfield, M. (2019, June 19). SIFT (the four moves). Hapgood. Hapgood.
5. Digital Inquiry Group. (n.d.). Civic Online Reasoning: About. Digital Inquiry Group.

A shark on the interstate

A hurricane is coming ashore, and a student editor named Ava is running her school's news account. A photo arrives in her feed: a shark fin cutting through brown floodwater on a highway, beside a submerged exit sign. The caption says it was taken on the interstate an hour ago. It has been shared more than 100,000 times. Ava downloads it and opens it in a free metadata viewer, which shows a date and time from that same morning. She posts it with the caption "Floodwaters bring a shark onto I-95," and adds, "We checked the photo's data."

Every step Ava took sounds careful. Every step was wrong, and the photo is one of the most famous fakes on the internet. According to a USA TODAY fact check, the shark comes from a 2005 photograph by the ocean photographer Thomas Peschak, which showed a great white shark following a kayak off the coast of South Africa. Someone pasted the shark into a picture of a flooded road, and the composite first spread in August 2011, during Hurricane Irene, as a scene from Puerto Rico. It has returned with storm after storm since, including Harvey in 2017, Laura in 2020 and Ian in 2022.

Ava's story is invented for this course. The shark, unfortunately, is not.

Tracing Ava's errors

"It looks real." Looking real is what a good composite is designed to do. Your eyes are not a verification tool, and neither are mine. The question is not whether an image looks authentic but where it came from.

"It has been shared 100,000 times." Shares measure attention. In Lesson 1 you saw that shareability rewards the surprising and the emotional, and a shark on a highway is both. A hundred thousand people who did not check are not one person who did.

"The metadata shows today's date." This is the subtlest error. Metadata, also called EXIF data for photos, is information stored inside an image file: often the camera or phone model, the date and time, and sometimes GPS coordinates. But Ava did not have the original file. She had a copy downloaded from social media. Trushar Barot of the BBC warns in the Verification Handbook that sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram strip out most, if not all, of a photo's original metadata when it is uploaded. What Ava's viewer showed was most likely the date her own copy was saved. Even on an original file, Barot notes, a timestamp may still be set to a factory default or another time zone, and anyone with free software can edit it.

The missing step. Ava never asked where the image first appeared. That is the one question that would have solved the case in under a minute.

In short: Looking real, being popular and carrying a recent date are not evidence. Verification starts with the image's history: where it first appeared and who made it.

Reverse image search: finding a picture's past

A reverse image search takes a picture instead of words and finds other places the same or a similar image appears online. Google's version is now part of Google Lens; TinEye and Bing Visual Search are others. Upload the image or paste its web address, and the results show earlier copies.

Barot's advice in the Verification Handbook is to look for the largest, highest-resolution version, because "usually, the image with the highest resolution/size should take you to the original source." Copies get smaller and blurrier as they are screenshotted and reshared. Then sort or scan the results by date. If a picture captioned "an hour ago" turns up in a news story from 2011, you are finished.

Ava's search would have returned dozens of fact-checks of the highway shark, and with a little digging, Peschak's original photo of the kayak. One search, one minute, no post.

Reverse search has limits. It finds only images that have been published and indexed somewhere. A brand-new photo that really was taken an hour ago will return nothing, and nothing proves nothing. That is when you turn to the photo's contents and the person who took it.

Real images, false contexts

Many misleading images are not edited at all. They are real pictures attached to the wrong event. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a photograph spread widely on Twitter showing three soldiers standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, described as a scene from the storm. As Barot tells the story, the image was accurate in that it did show soldiers at the Tomb, but it had been taken a month earlier and posted on the Facebook page of the First Army Division East. "An authentic image can still be placed in a false context," he writes.

So verification asks two separate questions. Is the image genuine, meaning not altered or generated? And is the label true: the place, the date, the event and what the image is said to show? A photo can pass the first test and fail the second.

What metadata can and cannot prove

The pattern in the table is simple. Metadata is a clue to compare with other evidence. It is strongest when you have the original file from the person who made it, and weakest on a copy from social media.

A storm video that turned out to be real

On September 28, 2022, as Hurricane Ian flooded southwest Florida, a video went viral showing a large finned animal swimming through a flooded backyard near Fort Myers. Given the highway shark's history, plenty of people assumed it was another fake. As Daniel Victor reported in the New York Times, this time it was real. Dominic Cameratta, a local real estate developer, confirmed to the Associated Press that he had filmed it himself from his home. The AP also analyzed the original clip's metadata, which showed it was recorded that Wednesday morning, and the news agency Storyful separately confirmed the footage.

Notice what made this verification possible: the person who filmed it, and the original file, not a copy. Notice too what stayed uncertain. Experts disagreed about whether the animal was a young shark or a large fish. So a careful headline would say a video shows a large fish, possibly a shark, in a flooded yard. Verification tells you exactly how much you know, which is not always everything.

The core of it: Verification works in both directions. The same method that exposes a fake can confirm something real, and a good report states plainly which parts are confirmed and which are not.

Checking a video: source, place and time

Video adds motion and sound, but the questions are the same. Work through them in this order.

1. Source. Who posted it first? Search for the video on several platforms and look for the earliest upload. Look at the uploader's account: how old it is, where they usually post from, whether they post original footage or collect other people's. Then contact them, and ask Barot's questions: who are you, where are you, when did you get there, what can you see, and why are you there? People who were really there tend to answer with specific, visual details.
2. Recycled footage. Take screenshots of a few distinct frames and run them through reverse image search, just like a photo. Old videos resurface with new captions all the time.
3. Place. Look for clues the Handbook lists: signs and lettering, license plates, landmarks, terrain, the style of buildings. Compare them with satellite and street-level maps. Finding where an image was made from its contents is called geolocation.
4. Time. Compare the weather in the video with weather records for that place and date, and check shadows against the sun's position for the claimed time. Pinning down when something was filmed is sometimes called chronolocation.
5. Not filmed at all. Some "war footage" comes from video games. In October 2023, AAP FactCheck in Australia traced viral clips of fighter jets and rocket interceptions, shared as footage of the Israel-Hamas war, to the military video game Arma 3. The game's developer, Bohemia Interactive, had warned in November 2022 that user-made Arma 3 videos were "falsely used as footage from real-life conflicts." Warning signs include very low resolution, blurring and exaggerated camera shake, which can hide the fact that a clip came from a game.

None of these steps requires special software. They require patience and the habit, from Lesson 5, of looking outside the post before trusting it.

Common misconceptions

• If a photo looks real, it probably is. Composites are built to look real. Ask where the image first appeared, not how convincing it looks.
• Metadata proves when and where a photo was taken. Social platforms usually strip it, device clocks can be wrong, and free tools can rewrite it. Metadata is a clue, strongest on the original file from the person who made it.
• A real photo cannot mislead. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier photo was genuine and still misled people, because it was a month old.
• Every viral disaster image is fake. The Fort Myers video was real. Assuming everything is fake is as lazy as assuming everything is true.
• No reverse search results means the image is original. It means the image has not been indexed. Go to the source.

Looking back

• The highway shark is a 2005 South African photo by Thomas Peschak pasted into a flooded road, circulating since 2011. Looking real, being widely shared and showing a recent date proved nothing.
• Reverse image search finds a picture's earlier appearances; the largest, oldest copy usually leads toward the original.
• Verification asks two questions: is the image genuine, and is its label true? Real images often travel with false captions.
• Metadata is a clue, not proof. Platforms strip it, clocks drift, and it can be edited. It helps most on an original file from the person who made it.
• For video, find the first uploader and contact them, reverse-search keyframes, and check place and time against maps, weather and shadows. Watch for video-game footage.
• The Fort Myers video shows verification can confirm the real, and that a careful report says exactly what remains uncertain.

Sources

1. Barot, T. (2014). Verifying images. In C. Silverman (Ed.), Verification Handbook: A definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage (Chapter 4). European Journalism Centre. Verification Handbook.
2. Faguy, A. (2022, October 13). Fact check: Fabricated image of shark on highway spreads online again. USA TODAY, via Yahoo News. Yahoo News.
3. Victor, D. (2022, September 30). For once, the hurricane shark was real. The New York Times, via Boston.com. Boston.com.
4. Summers, W. (2023, October 17). Video game footage mistaken for Israel-Hamas conflict. AAP FactCheck. AAP.

Smoke at the Pentagon

On the morning of Monday, May 22, 2023, an image spread on Twitter showing a black cloud of smoke beside a large building. The accounts posting it said there had been an explosion at the Pentagon. Many of them carried blue check marks, which Twitter then sold to anyone who paid for a subscription. One was an account impersonating Bloomberg News. Another was the real account of RT, the Kremlin-linked Russian news service, which later deleted its post. Major stock market indexes dipped briefly before recovering.

The denial came fast. "There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation," the Pentagon Force Protection Agency and the Arlington County fire department said in a joint statement. NPR reported that experts considered the image likely generated by artificial intelligence. Nick Waters of Bellingcat, an open-source investigations group, explained his reasoning on Twitter: "Check out the frontage of the building, and the way the fence melds into the crowd barriers. There's also no other images, videos or people posting as first hand witnesses."

Look at what settled the case. Not a piece of detection software, but three kinds of ordinary evidence: an on-the-record denial from the officials responsible, physical details that did not make sense, and the absence of what a real explosion near a busy building would produce, namely other photos, other videos and witnesses. That is lateral reading and source tracing, the methods of Lessons 5 and 6, applied to a picture a machine probably made.

The dispute: can a detector settle it?

Generative AI tools can now produce realistic images, clone a voice from a short sample and write fluent text on any subject. Newsrooms and schools have reached for software that promises to detect AI-made content. Should a reporter rely on it? Here are the strongest versions of the two positions, and the evidence each rests on.

The case for using tools

Detectors are not useless. In one study you will meet below, the same seven text detectors that failed badly on one group of writers classified essays by American eighth graders with near-perfect accuracy. On some kinds of content, under some conditions, a detector can be a useful first flag, and newsrooms that receive thousands of images in a breaking story need some way to decide what to check first.

The stronger argument concerns provenance, meaning a record of where a file came from and what was done to it. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an industry standards group, has built a system called Content Credentials, in which cameras and software attach a cryptographically signed record to a file. Any change to the file or its record breaks the signature, and the coalition says that faking a credential "would require breaking current cryptographic standards." When a photo carries valid credentials, you can see which device or program made it and how it was edited. That is much stronger evidence than a guess about pixels.

The case against relying on them

Start with the most telling evidence: the record of a detector built by a company that makes AI. On January 31, 2023, OpenAI released a classifier to identify AI-written text and described it as "not fully reliable." In its own tests on a set of English texts, it correctly identified only 26 percent of AI-written text as "likely AI-written," while wrongly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9 percent of the time. On July 20, 2023, OpenAI withdrew it, explaining that the classifier was "no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy."

Then there is fairness. In 2023, Stanford researchers led by Weixin Liang tested seven widely used detectors on 91 essays written for the TOEFL, an English test taken by non-native speakers, and on 88 essays by American eighth graders. The detectors were nearly perfect on the eighth graders. But they labeled more than half of the non-native writers' essays as AI-generated, an average false positive rate of 61 percent, and 89 of the 91 TOEFL essays were flagged by at least one detector. A false positive here means a human's work wrongly called AI's. The researchers also showed that simple prompting could get AI text past the detectors, and they cautioned against using them to judge students' work.

Provenance has limits too. The C2PA's own FAQ acknowledges that credentials "can be separated" from a file and that metadata "can be removed inadvertently or intentionally." As you learned in Lesson 6, big platforms strip metadata routinely, and most images online carry no credentials at all. So a missing credential proves nothing. And a valid credential tells you which device or program produced a file, not whether the caption describing the scene is true.

What would settle it

Two developments could change the answer. The first is independent, published testing of detectors on current, real-world content, with error rates reported for different groups of writers and creators, as Liang's team did. The second is provenance built into cameras and phones and preserved by the platforms that carry files. Neither exists at scale today.

Until then, the newsroom rule that follows from the evidence is the one the Associated Press adopted in its 2023 standards on generative AI: "Any output from a generative AI tool should be treated as unvetted source material." Treat a detector's verdict the same way. It is a lead that may tell you where to look. It is never a finding you can publish.

The upshot: No detector can settle whether something was made by AI. Verification still rests on the source, the context and corroboration, and a detector's score is at most a reason to look harder.

Three cases, solved by reporting

An image. The Pentagon picture was exposed by an official denial, visual inconsistencies and the absence of any other witnesses, as above. Even then, NPR wrote "likely" generated by AI, because no one could prove exactly how it was made. That caution is a model.

A voice. In January 2024, just before New Hampshire's presidential primary, thousands of households received a robocall in an AI-generated voice imitating President Joe Biden, urging them to skip the primary and "save their vote for the November election." The voice was traced through reporting. In February 2024, a New Orleans street magician told NBC News that a political consultant, Steve Kramer, had hired him to make the recording. In September 2024 the Federal Communications Commission fined Kramer $6 million for spoofing the calls, meaning disguising them to appear to come from a prominent local Democrat, and the company that carried them agreed to pay $1 million. In June 2025 a New Hampshire jury acquitted Kramer of criminal voter suppression and impersonation charges. He testified that he had meant the calls as a warning about the dangers of AI.

A text. In May 2025, the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer reading list in a special section licensed from an outside content partner. Of the 15 books it recommended, 10 did not exist. The invented titles were attached to real authors, including "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir. The paper's partner confirmed that "a freelancer used an AI agent to write the article." Chicago Public Media's chief executive, Melissa Bell, apologized and called it "a learning moment for all of journalism." Notice that no detector was needed here. Every title could have been checked against a library catalog in seconds. AI text tends to produce confident, specific, plausible facts that are false, so the defense is checking each fact, exactly as you would with any source.

Worth holding on to: In all three cases, the decisive evidence came from people and records: officials who denied the event, a magician who described his job, books that did not exist in any catalog.

A routine for suspected synthetic media

1. Stop and SIFT. Who posted it, and what do others say about them? Is there better coverage?
2. Find the first source and contact them. Real photographers and witnesses can answer specific questions and send other files from the same moment.
3. Look for corroboration. A real event leaves many traces: other angles, other witnesses, official statements, local news. A single image of a dramatic event with nothing around it is a warning.
4. Check context. Does the place match maps? Does the weather or lighting match the claimed date?
5. Inspect the content, cautiously. Odd hands, garbled lettering, impossible reflections and smeared backgrounds have been common signs of AI images. But generators keep improving, so these clues fade, and their absence proves nothing.
6. Check provenance if it exists. If a file carries Content Credentials, read them. If it does not, that tells you nothing.
7. Treat any detector as a lead only. Never publish "a detector says it's fake" as your evidence.
8. Say exactly what you know. "Likely generated by AI" and "we could not determine how it was made" are honest findings.

Writing a fact-check

A fact-check is a story whose subject is a claim. Most follow the same structure. Lead with the accurate information and the verdict, so a reader who stops after one sentence leaves with the truth rather than the rumor. State the claim exactly, with where and when it appeared. Then show the evidence step by step, linking to original documents wherever you can. End with what you could not confirm. Use a rating scale, such as true, mostly true, misleading and false, and define it so readers know what each rating means. The reporting assignment below asks you to write one.

Common misconceptions

• AI detectors can tell you for sure whether something was made by AI. OpenAI withdrew its own text classifier for low accuracy, and Liang's team found detectors flagged most non-native English writers' essays as AI-written.
• If an image has no Content Credentials, it must be fake. Most genuine images online carry none, and platforms strip metadata. Absence proves nothing.
• You can always spot AI by looking for weird hands. Visual flaws were common in early generated images and are becoming rarer. Corroboration and sourcing do not go out of date.
• AI-written text is easy to recognize because it is vague. The Sun-Times list was specific and confident: real authors, plausible titles. Specific claims need checking whoever, or whatever, wrote them.

Summing up

• The fake Pentagon image of May 22, 2023, briefly moved markets and was exposed by an official denial, visual flaws and the absence of any other witnesses.
• For tools: detectors can flag some content, and signed Content Credentials, when present, are strong evidence of where a file came from.
• Against relying on them: OpenAI's classifier caught 26 percent of AI text, wrongly flagged 9 percent of human text and was withdrawn; seven detectors flagged most non-native writers' essays as AI-written; credentials are often missing or stripped.
• What would settle it: independent testing on real-world content and provenance preserved from camera to platform. Until then, treat AI output and detector verdicts as unvetted leads, as the AP's standard says.
• The New Hampshire voice clone and the Sun-Times reading list were exposed by reporting and fact-checking, not by software.
• A fact-check leads with the accurate information and the verdict, shows each step, links to originals and states what remains unknown.

Sources

1. Bond, S. (2023, May 22). Fake viral images of an explosion at the Pentagon were probably created by AI. NPR. NPR.
2. OpenAI. (2023, January 31; note added July 20, 2023). New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text. Archived August 31, 2023. Internet Archive.
3. Liang, W., Yuksekgonul, M., Mao, Y., Wu, E., and Zou, J. (2023). GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers. Patterns, 4(7), 100779. arXiv.
4. Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. (n.d.). FAQs. C2PA.
5. Bookman, T. (2025, June 13). Political operative behind fake Biden robocalls in NH primary found not guilty. New Hampshire Public Radio, via New England Public Media. NEPM.
6. Harrington, A. (2025, May 20). "Summer reading list" with AI-generated titles of books that don't exist runs in Chicago Sun-Times. CBS News Chicago. CBS News.
7. Associated Press. (2023, August 15). Standards around generative AI. AP.

Seven words from Houston

On July 21, 1969, readers of the New York Times found this first sentence under the byline of the science reporter John Noble Wilford: "Men have landed and walked on the moon." Seven words. The biggest story of the decade, perhaps of the century, and the sentence uses nothing fancier than a plural noun and two verbs. Wilford did not open with the countdown, the history of the space race or the feelings of the crowd. He told you what happened.

That first sentence or paragraph of a news story is called the lede, an old newsroom spelling of "lead." It is the most important sentence you will write in any story, because many readers will read nothing else. This lesson starts with a page of notes and a deadline, the way real ledes start, and works out which fact belongs first.

The problem: a notebook from Tuesday's board meeting

You covered Tuesday night's school board meeting at Lakeview High School, the invented school from earlier lessons. It ran almost four hours. Here are your notes.

• 7:02 p.m. Meeting opens with the Pledge of Allegiance. All seven board members present.
• Board recognizes the girls' cross-country team, second at the state meet.
• Superintendent's report: enrollment is 2,310, down 41 from last year.
• 31 people signed up for public comment. Most spoke against ending the Friday late bus.
• Vote, 4-3, to end the Friday late bus starting January 6. Saves $86,000 a year, according to the district's transportation director, Mark Chen. Chen says about 140 students ride it on an average Friday.
• Board member Lisa Park, who voted no: "We can't keep cutting the things kids depend on."
• Board approves a $1.2 million roof repair contract, 7-0.
• 10:48 p.m. Meeting adjourns.

Before you write a word, ask the three questions from Lesson 1. What changed? For whom does it matter? What will readers need to do about it? Only one item changes the weekly life of a group of students, drew 31 speakers and split the board: the late bus. The roof contract is real money but changes nothing a reader will notice. The enrollment number is worth a sentence lower down. The cross-country team deserves its own story, which it probably already got when it placed at state.

Five drafts, debugged

Here are five first attempts at the lede, each a mistake beginning reporters make every day, followed by what is wrong.

Draft 1, chronological: "The Lakeview school board met Tuesday night at 7 p.m. and began with the Pledge of Allegiance." This tells the story in the order it happened, which is the order least useful to the reader. The news arrived three hours into the meeting, so it should not arrive three paragraphs into the story.

Draft 2, vague: "The school board made an important decision Tuesday that will affect many students." Which decision? Which students? Words like important and many ask the reader to take your word for it. Specific facts make the case for you.

Draft 3, overloaded: "The school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus starting Jan. 6, saving $86,000, after hearing from 31 speakers, and also approved a $1.2 million roof contract, recognized the cross-country team and heard that enrollment fell by 41." That is 46 words and four separate stories. A lede carries one main idea. Everything else waits its turn.

Draft 4, a question: "Do you ride the late bus on Fridays?" Most readers will answer no and stop reading. A question lede also delays the news while pretending to be friendly. Purdue's Online Writing Lab advises using question, quote and direct-address ledes sparingly.

Draft 5, a quote: "'We can't keep cutting the things kids depend on,' board member Lisa Park said." Strong words, but the reader does not yet know what was cut, by whom or why it matters. A quote needs context, so it usually belongs in the second or third paragraph.

Now the working version:

The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, starting Jan. 6 to save $86,000 a year.

Twenty-seven words. Who (the board, and the 140 riders), what (end the late bus), when (voted Tuesday, ends Jan. 6), why (to save $86,000). The vote count signals conflict. A second strong version leads with the people affected rather than the decision-makers: "About 140 Lakeview students will lose their Friday late bus Jan. 6 after the school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to cut it and save $86,000 a year." Either works. The choice depends on whether your readers care more about who decided or who is affected, and for a student news site the riders might win.

Remember: Find the one fact that changed something for your readers, and build the first sentence around it. Everything else in your notes can wait for the second paragraph or later.

The summary lede, by the rules

The lede you just built is a summary lede, the standard for breaking news. Purdue's Online Writing Lab, a widely used writing guide, says leads generally run 25 to 30 words, rarely more than 40, and are often a single sentence. Its advice is to decide which of the five Ws and H matters most and emphasize that one, saving less important details for the second or third sentence.

A few more working rules:

• Use a subject, a strong verb and an object, in that order: "The board voted," not "A vote was taken by the board." Active verbs are shorter and say who acted.
• Prefer exact numbers and names to adjectives. "$86,000" persuades; "a lot of money" does not.
• Translate jargon. Boards "rescind motions" and "approve consent agendas." Readers lose buses.
• Do not start with "it." Purdue's guide notes that most editors frown on ledes that begin with it, because the word is not precise and disorients the reader.
• Attribute claims that could be disputed. "Saves $86,000 a year" is the district's figure, so the second paragraph should say so: "according to transportation director Mark Chen."

When the news is not the first sentence

Not every story opens with a summary. Features, and some news stories with a strong human side, use a delayed lede, which opens on a person, scene or detail and reaches the news a paragraph or two later. A delayed lede that tells a brief illustrative story is an anecdotal lede.

The best delayed ledes are short. Edna Buchanan covered crime for the Miami Herald and won a Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting in 1986. One of her stories, about a man who was shot by a security guard after he punched a worker at a fast-food counter, began: "Gary Robinson died hungry." In a 2018 appreciation for Nieman Storyboard, the editor Tom Warhover explains why four words worked: you do not know who Gary Robinson is, but you immediately want to know why he died and why hunger is the first thing you are told about him.

Delayed openings are old. In 1887, the reporter Nellie Bly began her account of going undercover in a New York asylum for the World by describing her assignment: whether she could have herself committed and live for a week among the patients without being found out. She finished the paragraph with three short sentences that pull a reader forward: "I said I could and I would. And I did."

Here is a delayed lede for the late bus story:

Every Friday at 4:15, sophomore Maya Torres catches the late bus home after robotics practice, a 20-minute ride that would take her an hour to walk. Starting Jan. 6, the bus won't be there. The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, to save $86,000 a year.

Two rules keep a delayed lede honest. First, reach the news fast, within two or three paragraphs, because readers will not wait long. Second, choose a person or scene that is typical, not just the most dramatic one you found. If most riders have a parent who can drive them, opening with the one student who would walk an hour misleads the reader about the size of the problem.

The point: A summary lede gives the news at once; a delayed lede earns attention with a person or detail and then gives the news within a few paragraphs. Breaking news almost always wants the summary.

Common misconceptions

• A lede must answer all five Ws and H. Packing in all six produces Draft 3. Lead with the one or two that matter most and let the rest follow.
• A story should start at the beginning. Events happen in time order; news is told in order of importance. The Pledge of Allegiance happened first and matters least.
• A clever lede is a better lede. Wilford's moon lede is the opposite of clever, and it is one of the most quoted first sentences in American journalism. Wit helps only when it serves clarity.
• A great quote makes a great lede. Without context the reader cannot tell who is speaking or why. Quotes usually do their best work in the second or third paragraph.

What to remember

• The lede is the first sentence or paragraph, and for many readers it is the whole story.
• Start from your notes by asking what changed, for whom, and what readers need to do. Build the lede around that one fact.
• A summary lede usually runs 25 to 30 words, rarely more than 40; it emphasizes the most important W and saves the rest for later.
• Avoid chronological, vague, overloaded, question, quote and "it" openings.
• Use active verbs, exact numbers and plain words, and attribute any figure someone could dispute.
• A delayed or anecdotal lede must be short, typical and quick to reach the news.

Sources

1. Wilford, J. N. (1969, July 21). Men walk on moon. The New York Times. Reprinted on the Times's "On This Day" archive. New York Times.
2. Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). Writing leads. Purdue University. Purdue OWL.
3. Warhover, T. (2018, July 21). Gary Robinson died hungry. Nieman Storyboard. Nieman Storyboard.
4. Bly, N. (1887). Ten days in a mad-house. Ian L. Munro. Chapter I, A delicate mission. Project Gutenberg.

Two reports of the same night

On the night of April 14, 1865, Lawrence Gobright, the Associated Press correspondent in Washington, filed his account of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. It began at the beginning: "President Lincoln and wife visited Ford's Theatre this evening for the purpose of witnessing the performance." The reader learned about the crowded house and the third act before reaching the pistol shot.

A few hours later, at 1:30 a.m., the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, sent an official telegram to Major General John Dix in New York, and newspapers printed it on their front pages. It began like this:

This evening at about 9:30 P.M. at Ford's Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, ... was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and appeared behind the President. The assassin then leaped upon the stage, brandishing a large dagger or knife, and made his escape in the rear of the theatre. The pistol ball entered the back of the President's head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal.

Stanton's next paragraphs reported the attack on Secretary of State William Seward the same hour, then the President's condition. Near the end came details that mattered least that night: General Grant and his wife had been advertised to attend the theater but had left for Burlington at 6 o'clock, and the cabinet had discussed peace that day. The most important fact came first, and each paragraph after it mattered a little less than the one before.

That shape is called the inverted pyramid, and it is still the standard structure of a news story.

Where the shape came from: a real dispute

You may have heard that Civil War reporters invented the inverted pyramid because telegraph lines could be cut at any moment, so the key facts had to go first. In a 2003 essay for the Poynter Institute, the writing coach Chip Scanlan calls that a romantic idea the evidence does not support: researchers who studied leading newspapers of the period found many Civil War stories still written in time order. The telegraph did matter in a more ordinary way. It was expensive, with one early rate of a penny a character, and that pressure favored compact, factual writing.

The historian David T. Z. Mindich argues, in Scanlan's words, that "the inverted pyramid was born with the coverage of Lincoln's death," pointing to Stanton's telegram. Other scholars disagree. A study titled "The Evolution of the Summary News Lead," which Scanlan describes, challenges Mindich's account and ties the spread of the form to social forces that came later, around the turn of the twentieth century. So the honest answer to "who invented the inverted pyramid?" is that historians are still arguing, and the evidence that would settle it is careful counting of how stories were actually written, year by year, across many newspapers.

Whichever date is right, the form won. Purdue's Online Writing Lab describes it simply: the most fundamental information goes in the lead, and the rest is added "in order of importance, so that the least important items are at the bottom."

The shape, and why it works

Picture the story as a triangle standing on its point, widest at the top. From the top down, it holds:

1. the lede: the most important fact;
2. key details and attribution;
3. quotes and reaction;
4. background, the least important, at the narrow bottom.

The inverted pyramid serves two people. The first is the reader, who can stop after any paragraph and still leave with the most important facts. The second is the editor, who can cut a story from the bottom to fit the space without losing anything essential, as Purdue's guide notes. Online there is no shortage of space, but readers still stop early, so the logic still holds.

The rule for building one is a single question asked over and over: of everything I have not used yet, what does the reader most need next?

Worked example: building the late bus story

Go back to the Lakeview school board notes from Lesson 8. Here is the story built paragraph by paragraph, with a note on why each paragraph sits where it does. Two quotes have been added from the reporter's interviews after the meeting.

Paragraph 1, the lede. "The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, starting Jan. 6 to save $86,000 a year." The news, in 27 words.

Paragraph 2, attribution and key detail. "The figures come from the district's transportation director, Mark Chen, who said the bus makes two routes each Friday at 4:15 p.m. for students who stay for clubs, sports and tutoring." The reader's next question is "says who?", so the source of the numbers comes right away.

Paragraph 3, why they did it. "Board President David Kim, who voted for the cut, said the district faces a $1.4 million budget gap next year as enrollment falls. 'Every option on our list hurts somebody,' Kim said." The reason for the decision is the next most important thing.

Paragraph 4, the other side. "Board member Lisa Park, who voted no, said students without rides would have to drop activities. 'We can't keep cutting the things kids depend on,' Park said." Fairness means the losing side appears high, not buried at the bottom.

Paragraph 5, public reaction. "Thirty-one people signed up to speak before the vote, most of them against the cut. Senior Jalen Brooks said he rides the bus after tutoring three days a week. 'Friday is the day I can't get a ride,' he said." Reaction from the people affected.

Paragraph 6, what happens next. "Chen said the district will post information about public bus routes near the school before Jan. 6." Useful to readers, so it ranks above the remaining business.

Paragraph 7, other business. "In other business, the board approved a $1.2 million roof repair contract and heard that enrollment is 2,310, down 41 from last year." The least important facts, at the bottom, where an editor could cut them.

Read it again and notice what the chronological order of the evening (pledge, awards, report, comments, vote, roof) has become: an order of importance. The meeting took four hours. The story takes a minute to read and loses nothing that matters.

Worth holding on to: The inverted pyramid is a ranking, repeated paragraph by paragraph: what does the reader need next? Attribution, the reasons, the other side and what happens next usually outrank background and other business.

The nut graf

When a story opens with a delayed lede, such as a person or a scene, the reader needs to learn quickly what the story is really about. The paragraph that does that job is the nut graf. In a 2019 piece for Nieman Storyboard, Chip Scanlan traces the device to news features on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, from which it spread to newsrooms across the country. Ken Wells, a Journal Page One editor, defined it this way: "It's a paragraph that says what this whole story is about and why you should read it."

Here is the delayed lede from Lesson 8 with a nut graf added after it:

Every Friday at 4:15, sophomore Maya Torres catches the late bus home after robotics practice, a 20-minute ride that would take her an hour to walk. Starting Jan. 6, the bus won't be there.

The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, to save $86,000 a year as the district faces a $1.4 million budget gap. Students who stay late for clubs and sports say they have no other way home; board members who backed the cut say the district can no longer afford a bus that runs one day a week.

A good nut graf does three things: it states the news, gives the context that makes it matter, and previews the tension the rest of the story will explore. Not every writer loves it. Scanlan reports that some argue a heavy-handed nut graf interrupts a narrative or gives away its ending, and long narrative stories sometimes skip it. For news features under 1,000 words, which is most of what you will write, editors almost always want one, and high up.

Run it again: a new fact changes the order

At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the superintendent emails families: the district will apply for a state transportation grant that, if approved, could restore the Friday bus by March. That changes the story.

A follow-up story leads with the newest development, because the vote is now yesterday's news and the grant is what changed:

The Lakeview school district will apply for a state grant that could restore the Friday late bus by March, the superintendent said Wednesday, a day after the school board voted 4-3 to cut the route.

The vote moves down to become background in the second paragraph. The 140 riders and the $86,000 move into the third. The grant's amount, its deadline and the odds of winning it, which you now have to report, move up near the top, because they are what readers will want next. Every new fact sends you back to the same question about what the reader needs next, and the pyramid gets re-sorted.

When to use a different shape

The inverted pyramid is built for news that readers want quickly. Other stories need other shapes. A narrative feature may tell events in time order, because the suspense is the point. A profile may move between scenes. A Q&A runs in the order of the conversation, edited for clarity. An explainer may be organized around readers' questions. Even then, most of these forms put a short summary of what the story is about near the top, which is the nut graf's job.

Common misconceptions

• The inverted pyramid was invented because Civil War telegraph lines kept getting cut. Historians dispute this. Many Civil War stories were written in time order, and scholars still argue about whether the form began with Lincoln's assassination or decades later.
• Every story should be an inverted pyramid. It suits breaking news. Features, narratives, profiles and Q&As often use other shapes.
• The bottom of the pyramid does not matter, so it can be sloppy. The least important facts still have to be accurate. They may be the first thing an editor cuts, but anything that runs must be right.
• The nut graf is the same as the lede. In a summary-lede story, the lede does both jobs. In a delayed-lede story, the nut graf comes after the opening and explains what the story is about.

Pulling it together

• Stanton's 1865 telegram put the shooting first and the least important details last; the AP's report of the same night started at the beginning of the evening.
• Historians disagree about the form's origin: Mindich points to Lincoln's death, while other research dates its spread decades later. The telegraph's cost favored compact writing, but the cut-lines story is not well supported.
• Build a pyramid by asking, again and again, what the reader needs next: usually attribution, reasons, the other side and what happens next, before background and other business.
• A nut graf, born on the Wall Street Journal's front page in the 1970s, tells readers what the whole story is about and why to read it.
• When a new fact arrives, it can become the new lede, and everything else gets re-sorted.

Sources

1. Stanton, E. M. (1865, April 15). Official dispatch to Maj. Gen. John A. Dix, 1:30 a.m., as printed in The New York Times. Reprinted on the Times's "On This Day" archive. New York Times.
2. Gobright, L. (1865, April 14). Associated Press report of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Released by the AP for the 150th anniversary, via NBC10 Philadelphia (2015). NBC10.
3. Scanlan, C. (2003, June 20). Birth of the inverted pyramid: A child of technology, commerce and history. The Poynter Institute.
4. Mindich, D. T. Z. (1998). Just the facts: How "objectivity" came to define American journalism. New York University Press.
5. Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). The inverted pyramid structure. Purdue University. Purdue OWL.
6. Scanlan, C. (2019, January 30). Nut grafs: Overused, misused, or merely misunderstood? Nieman Storyboard. Nieman Storyboard.

"Intellectual gigolo": a case about quotation marks

In December 1983, the New Yorker published a two-part article by the writer Janet Malcolm about Jeffrey Masson, a psychoanalyst who had been fired from his job as projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. The article put many words inside quotation marks as Masson's own. In one passage, he described himself as having been "like an intellectual gigolo." Masson sued for libel, saying he had never said several of the quoted passages. Malcolm had taped more than 40 hours of interviews with him, and for several of the disputed quotations, as the Supreme Court later noted, no identical statement appeared anywhere on the tapes.

The case, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, reached the Supreme Court in 1991. Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion explained what quotation marks mean to a reader: "In general, quotation marks around a passage indicate to the reader that the passage reproduces the speaker's words verbatim." Verbatim means word for word. The Court then set a narrow legal rule: changing a speaker's words does not by itself prove the kind of knowing falsehood that libel law requires of a public figure, "unless the alteration results in a material change in the meaning conveyed by the statement." It sent the case back to the lower courts for trial.

Notice the gap between the law and the craft. The law asked only whether the meaning materially changed. Readers ask something simpler. When they see quotation marks, they believe they are reading the speaker's exact words, because that is what quotation marks promise. This lesson is about keeping that promise, and about the other tools you use to tell readers who said what.

Three ways to use what a source said

Rodrigo Zamith of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in his open textbook The American Journalism Handbook, advises using direct quotes for emotions, opinions, personal experiences and newsworthy expressions, and paraphrasing dry facts. Here are the three tools side by side, using material from the late bus story.

A paraphrase is not a looser kind of quote. It still has to be accurate, and it still needs attribution, because the information came from someone. Zamith also warns that word choice in a paraphrase can change the tone of what was said, so stay close to the speaker's meaning.

Keep quotes short, usually one to three sentences, and spread them through the story rather than stacking them at the end.

Attribution: who said it, and how to say "said"

Use said. It is the neutral verb, and it is fine to repeat it as often as you need. Zamith explains why: other verbs imply motives a reporter cannot confirm. "Claimed" suggests the speaker may be lying. "Admitted" suggests guilt. "Insisted" suggests stubbornness. Verbs such as "laughed" or "smiled" describe actions, not speech. Readers stop noticing "said," which is exactly what you want, because the words in the quote should do the work.

Placement. The default order is name then verb: "Kim said." Put the verb first when you add a description after the name: "said Kim, who voted for the cut." When a quote runs longer than one sentence, put the attribution after the first sentence, so the reader learns who is speaking before reading on:

"Friday is the day I can't get a ride," Brooks said. "My mom works until 6, and the city bus doesn't stop near my street."

First and later references. The first time a person appears, give the full name and title: "Board President David Kim." After that, use the last name only: "Kim." If several paragraphs pass, remind readers who the person is.

Attribute claims, not established facts. You do not need to attribute what you saw or what is undisputed and documented. You do need to attribute opinions, predictions, disputed numbers and anything you did not witness.

Attribution tells readers where information came from. It does not move the responsibility for publishing it off your shoulders. If a speaker states something you can check and it is false, attribution is not enough: check it, and tell readers what the record shows.

Say how you got it. If a quote came from an email, a written statement or a press release, say so: "said in an email," "said in a statement." Zamith notes that quotes in press releases are often written by spokespeople, so prefer an interview with the person in charge when you can get one.

Bottom line: Use said, put the name where the reader needs it, and attribute every opinion, prediction and number you did not establish yourself.

Can you fix a quote? Where newsrooms differ

People do not speak in clean sentences. They say "um," start over and trail off. How much may a reporter tidy that up before putting it in quotation marks? Newsrooms have long disagreed. In a 1991 case study for the ethics journal FineLine, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Doreen Carvajal put the question plainly: "Most reporters and editors see no harm in 'cleaning up' quotes. But how much is too much?" At the time, she reported, the New York Times had no written policy, while the Inquirer's rule generally forbade changing quotes but allowed fixing grammar when an exact quote would confuse readers or make the speaker look foolish.

Two marks let you shorten or clarify honestly. An ellipsis (...) shows that words were left out, and you may use it only if the meaning stays the same. Square brackets show a word you added for clarity: "We voted for [the cut] because we had no choice." Use both sparingly. If a quote needs much repair, it is telling you to paraphrase.

Remember: Inside quotation marks, keep the speaker's exact words. Everywhere else, you have the freedom of paraphrase, as long as the meaning stays the speaker's.

House style: the same thing written the same way

Should you write 8 p.m. or 8:00 PM? "Jan. 6" or "January 6th"? A style guide settles small questions like these so that readers are not distracted by inconsistency and writers do not waste time deciding. Most American newsrooms follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which Purdue's Online Writing Lab describes as widely used by U.S. newspapers, magazines and public relations offices. Its entries are copyrighted and sold by subscription, so this course does not reproduce them. Below is a short house style sheet written for this course, based on conventions widely used in American news writing. If your school publication has its own style sheet, follow it.

Your publication will meet new questions that no style sheet answers: the name of the new gym, whether it is "e-sports" or "esports." Decide once, add it to the sheet and keep using it. Consistency is the point.

Common misconceptions

• Varying "said" with "stated," "exclaimed" and "claimed" makes writing livelier. Those verbs carry judgments you cannot confirm. "Said" is neutral, and readers do not tire of it.
• If I attribute a claim, I am not responsible for it. Attribution tells readers the source. You still chose to publish it, so check what can be checked and give readers the record.
• Cleaning up a quote is always fine as long as the meaning survives. Newsrooms disagree, and readers take quotation marks literally. When in doubt, paraphrase.
• AP style is a law of journalism. It is a convention, and house styles differ. What matters is choosing a style and applying it consistently.

The takeaway

• Quotation marks promise the speaker's exact words. In Masson v. New Yorker (1991), the Supreme Court said they tell readers a passage is the speaker's words verbatim.
• Use direct quotes for opinion, emotion and experience; partial quotes for a striking phrase; paraphrase for facts and figures. All three need attribution.
• Use "said." Attribute after the first sentence of a long quote. Full name and title first, last name after.
• Attribute opinions, predictions, disputed numbers and anything you did not witness; attribution does not excuse publishing something you could have checked.
• Newsrooms differ on tidying quotes, but no one may change a speaker's words or invent them. When in doubt, paraphrase.
• A house style sheet keeps numbers, dates, times, titles and places consistent. AP style is the common American standard; describe it, do not copy it.

Sources

1. Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., 501 U.S. 496 (1991). Legal Information Institute.
2. Zamith, R. (n.d.). Quotes and attribution. In The American Journalism Handbook: Concepts, Issues, and Skills (Chapter 10.3). University of Massachusetts Amherst; LibreTexts. CC BY-NC 4.0. LibreTexts.
3. Carvajal, D. (1991, January). The great quote question. FineLine. Reprinted in the Indiana University Media School ethics case studies. Indiana University.
4. Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). AP style. Purdue University. Purdue OWL.

A press agent says no

In November 1965, Esquire magazine sent the writer Gay Talese to Los Angeles to write about Frank Sinatra, one of the most famous entertainers in the world and a month from his 50th birthday. Talese had not wanted the assignment. As he later told the editor Elon Green, his editor, Harold Hayes, insisted: "It's a cover piece. His press agent, Jim Mahoney, will give you access to him." Then Mahoney told Talese that Sinatra would not talk to him. Sinatra, the explanation went, had a cold.

Talese did not go home. He stayed, by Green's count, 31 days. He interviewed, in his own phrase, "at least a hundred" people in Sinatra's circle. He watched Sinatra wherever Sinatra appeared in public. And he planned the story the way he is famous for planning stories, in outlines drawn on cardboard shirt boards, the stiff inserts that come back with laundered shirts. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in Esquire's April 1966 issue and became one of the most studied magazine profiles ever written, without a single interview with its subject.

It opens in a private club in Beverly Hills. Sinatra stands in a dark corner of the bar, a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, saying nothing, while his friends know better than to force a conversation. Then the explanation arrives, in five words: "Frank Sinatra had a cold." Talese goes on to show what that meant: a singer about to tape a television special, unsure of his voice, and dozens of people around him whose moods rose and fell with his. A few pages later comes a scene in the club's poolroom, where Sinatra fixes on the boots of a young screenwriter named Harlan Ellison and an argument flares.

That is a profile: a story about a person, built from scenes, details and other people as much as from the subject's own words.

What a feature is

A feature is a story that explores rather than simply reports: a person, a place, a trend, a problem, a way of life. Features still rest on facts, but they are less tied to a single day's events, and they are written to hold a reader for longer. A profile is one kind of feature. Others include the news feature, which explores the human side of a current story; the trend story, about something happening more and more; the explainer; and the behind-the-scenes look at how something works.

Read the last row twice. Features feel softer than news, but every detail in them is a factual claim. The scene in the Beverly Hills club had to have happened, the bourbon had to be bourbon, and the boots had to be the boots Ellison was wearing.

Reporting around a closed door

Talese's method is useful to you for a reason he never intended: most of what makes a profile good does not come from the interview with its subject. Even when your subject talks to you freely, people describe themselves in general terms. The specific material comes from three other places.

• Observation. Watch the person doing what they do: coaching a practice, running a meeting, cooking in the cafeteria at 6 a.m. Write down what you see and hear, exactly, as it happens.
• The people around them. Talese's hundred interviews were mostly with the people near Sinatra. For a school profile, three or four will do: a colleague, a student, a family member, a rival or critic. Each sees a different side.
• Documents and earlier coverage. Programs, records, yearbooks, earlier stories, team statistics. They supply dates and facts that memory gets wrong.

Those three sources also protect you. A profile based only on the subject's account of themselves is a press release. A profile built from observation and other voices can be checked, and it is usually fairer, because it shows the person as others experience them.

So what? A profile is reported, not just conducted. Observe, talk to the people around your subject, and check the documents, and you will have material no single interview could give you.

The anatomy of a feature

Most features share a structure you can learn and then bend.

1. The opening. A scene, an anecdote or a striking detail that pulls the reader in: Sinatra silent at the bar.
2. The nut graf. The paragraph that says what the story is about and why it matters, which you met in Lesson 9. In Talese's piece, the paragraph that begins "Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel" does that job: it tells you why a cold is worth a magazine cover.
3. The body. Organized by scenes or themes rather than by importance. Each section should add something the reader did not know.
4. Quotes as voice. In a feature, quotes reveal character. Use the ones that sound like the person.
5. The kicker. An ending that leaves the reader with a final image, quote or thought, often circling back to the opening.

Detail that does work

Talese tells you that Ellison's Game Warden boots had cost $60 and that Sinatra could not stop looking at them. That one detail sets up the confrontation that follows and tells you something about both men. This is what writers mean by "show, don't tell." Instead of saying Sinatra was irritable, Talese shows the boots, the stare and the argument.

Good detail is specific (not "nice shoes" but "brown corduroy slacks and Game Warden boots"), observed (you saw or heard it, or a source you name did), and relevant (it reveals character, mood or conflict). Adjectives such as "amazing," "dedicated" and "passionate" are the opposite: they tell the reader what to think without giving any evidence.

One line no feature writer may cross: every detail must be true. You may not invent a scene, rearrange events into a better order and present them as they happened, or merge several real people into one "composite" character. In Module 6 you will meet a feature writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a boy who did not exist.

A dispute inside the craft: Talese and the direct quote

In his 2013 conversation with Green, Talese said he does not use a tape recorder because "I don't want the tape recorder to contradict what I think is potentially a better quote." He said he tries to capture "the most ideal representation of what they think, not what they say," and that he avoids direct quotes when he can, preferring to tell the story in his own voice.

There is a real point in that. Paraphrase in a confident narrative voice, as you learned in Lesson 10, is legitimate and often reads better than a string of quotes. But look at it from the reader's side. Quotation marks promise the speaker's exact words, and a recording is the best protection a reporter has when a quote is disputed. For your work in this course the rule from Lesson 10 stands: tell the story in your own voice as much as you like, and when you use quotation marks, use the exact words.

The point: Admire the method and keep the standard. Talese's observation and persistence are worth copying; his preference for a "better quote" over a recording is not a license to improve what people said.

Profiling someone at your school

Choose a subject with a story, not just a title: the custodian who has worked every graduation since 1995, the freshman who runs a business, the coach rebuilding a team that lost every game last year. Then:

1. Research first: earlier stories, programs, records, social media posts that are public.
2. Interview for stories, not adjectives. "Tell me about the first day you worked here" gets a scene. "Do you like your job?" gets "yes."
3. Observe with permission, in public or school settings, following your school's rules and the safety rules from Lesson 2.
4. Talk to at least three people who know the subject in different ways, including someone who has disagreed with them.
5. Find the "why now," a news peg: a milestone, an award, a change, a season starting.
6. Include the whole person. Setbacks, criticism and doubts belong in a fair profile, reported accurately and with the subject given a chance to respond.

Common misconceptions

• A profile lists the subject's accomplishments. That is a résumé. A profile shows a person in action, through scenes, detail and other people's views.
• Features can be looser with facts because they are "soft." Every detail in a feature is a factual claim. Invented or rearranged scenes are fabrication.
• You cannot write a profile without interviewing the subject. Talese did, from observation and a hundred other interviews. You will usually get the interview, but it is one source among several.
• Vivid writing means strong adjectives. Vivid writing means specific, observed detail. Adjectives ask readers to take your word for it.

Recap

• Denied an interview, Gay Talese spent 31 days observing Frank Sinatra and interviewing at least a hundred people; "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" ran in Esquire in April 1966.
• A feature explores a person, place, trend or problem; it often opens with a scene, uses a nut graf, follows themes and ends with a kicker. Its facts must all be true.
• Report a profile from observation, the people around the subject and documents, not just one interview.
• Use specific, observed, relevant detail; never invent scenes or composite characters.
• Talese avoided tape recorders and direct quotes; in this course, quotation marks still mean exact words.
• A fair profile shows the whole person, including setbacks and criticism, with a chance to respond.

Sources

1. Green, E. (2013, October 8). Gay Talese explains why he wrote iconic Esquire profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (annotation, with the full text of the 1966 article). Nieman Storyboard. Nieman Storyboard.
2. Talese, G. (1966, April). Frank Sinatra has a cold. Esquire. Reprinted in G. Talese, Fame and Obscurity (1970).
3. Morrison, S. (2013, October 8). Gay Talese reveals story behind "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." TheWrap. TheWrap.
4. Scanlan, C. (2019, January 30). Nut grafs: Overused, misused, or merely misunderstood? Nieman Storyboard. Nieman Storyboard.

A letter from an 8-year-old

On September 21, 1897, the New York Sun printed a letter from an 8-year-old named Virginia O'Hanlon of 115 West Ninety-fifth Street. "Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus," she wrote. "Papa says 'If you see it in The Sun it's so.' Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?"

The paper answered in an unsigned editorial, written by one of its editors, Francis Pharcellus Church. It has become, by most accounts, the most reprinted newspaper editorial in the English language. Because it was published in 1897, it is in the public domain, so you can read its most famous lines in full:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. ... Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

Look past the subject and notice two things. First, the editorial is the newspaper speaking in its own voice. No byline appears; the opinion belongs to the Sun. Second, Virginia's father had told her that whatever appeared in the Sun was so. He did not distinguish between the paper's news columns and its opinions. That trust, and that confusion, are exactly what the modern argument about newspaper opinion is about.

A different editorial: a fact and a target

A year earlier, on August 15, 1896, William Allen White, the young editor of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, published "What's the Matter with Kansas?" It opens not with an opinion but with a fact:

Today the Kansas Department of Agriculture sent out a statement which indicates that Kansas has gained less than two thousand people in the past year.

White goes on to say that some ten thousand babies had been born in the state that year, so the tiny gain meant that people, and their money, were leaving. Then he turns the numbers into a furious, sarcastic attack on the politicians he blamed. The editorial was reprinted across the country in support of the Republican presidential candidate, William McKinley.

White's piece shows both what opinion writing can do and what it can be. It builds an argument on a reported fact, which is good practice. It is also openly partisan and scornful of its opponents. An editorial is allowed to take sides. It is not allowed to get its facts wrong.

The forms of opinion

The Journalism Education Association's model editorial policy for student publications puts it this way: the student editorial board determines the content, "including all unsigned editorials. The views stated in editorials represent that of a majority of the editorial board. Signed columns or reviews represent only the opinion of the author." The SPJ Code of Ethics adds the rule that holds the system together: "Label advocacy and commentary." A reader should never have to guess whether a piece is news or opinion.

The dispute: should a news organization take sides at all?

Many newsrooms have argued about whether they should publish their own opinions, and especially whether they should endorse candidates. Here is the strongest case on each side.

The case against. Readers may not keep the two kinds of content apart. In a 2018 survey of 5,035 American adults, the Pew Research Center asked people to classify five factual statements and five opinion statements from the news. A majority got at least three of each set right, which Pew called only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer got all five right, and roughly a quarter got most or all of them wrong. Republicans and Democrats were both more likely to call a statement factual when it favored their own side. If readers cannot reliably tell opinion from fact, a publication's opinions may color how readers judge its reporting.

In October 2024, the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, ended the paper's practice of endorsing presidential candidates on similar grounds. "Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election," he wrote. "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias."

The case for. An editorial page is one of the oldest ways a newspaper serves its community: it can argue for what readers need, scrutinize officials and give readers a forum in letters. Supporters point out that the opinions are labeled, so the problem is not opinion but unlabeled opinion.

The Post's decision showed how strongly many journalists hold this view. Three members of its editorial board resigned and thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions. The paper's former executive editor, Marty Baron, argued that if the owners believed readers should make up their own minds, they should stop running editorials altogether; instead, he said, "they only decided not to run an editorial in this one instance 11 days before the election." Bezos, for his part, called the late timing "inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy," and denied allegations that he had withheld the endorsement to win favor with Donald Trump.

For student publications, there is a further argument: an editorial on a school issue, such as start times or a phone policy, may be the only way students' views reach the people deciding it before the vote.

What would settle it. The disagreement turns on a question research can test: do clear labels and separate opinion sections keep readers from confusing a publication's opinions with its reporting? Pew's study offers a warning sign, because tying statements to news outlets had limited effect on people's ability to classify them. Until the evidence is stronger, many student papers settle on a middle path: editorials on school and local issues, clearly labeled; no endorsements of candidates; and reporters who cover a story kept off the editorials about it.

The core of it: The argument is not about whether opinions are allowed. It is about whether readers can tell them apart from news, which is why labeling and separation matter so much.

Writing an editorial that earns its opinion

1. Choose an issue readers can affect. A pending vote, a policy under review, a problem with a fix.
2. Report it first. Get the documents and interview the people responsible, exactly as you would for a news story. An editorial built on a mistaken fact collapses.
3. State the position early, in the first or second paragraph.
4. Give the evidence, with sources.
5. State the strongest counterargument fairly, in terms its supporters would accept, and answer it.
6. End with a specific call to action: who should do what, and by when.

Here is a short model on the invented late bus decision:

The Lakeview school board should restore the Friday late bus before it disappears on Jan. 6. About 140 students ride it each week, according to the district's transportation director, many of them to stay for tutoring, clubs and sports that the district itself encourages. The board says the cut saves $86,000 toward a $1.4 million budget gap, and that gap is real. But the cheapest savings are the ones that push students out of the activities that keep them in school. The district should apply for the state transportation grant it mentioned this week, and the board should vote at its December meeting to keep the bus running until the grant decision is known.

Notice what the editorial does. It takes a side, uses only facts that were reported and attributed, concedes the budget problem is real, and names a specific action and date.

Reviews and columns

A review is an informed judgment, and readers deserve to see the reasons behind it. Name your criteria, such as the acting, the plot, the pacing or the value for money, and back each judgment with specific evidence from the work. Warn readers before you reveal an ending. And watch for conflicts of interest: the SPJ code tells journalists to refuse "gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment." If a theater gives you a free ticket for a review, disclose it, or better, decline it, as your publication's policy directs. Do not review a play your best friend directed.

A column is personal, and its voice can be funny, angry or reflective. But a column's facts must be as accurate as a news story's, and its targets are owed the same fairness. A column that quotes someone is still bound by everything in Lesson 10.

Common misconceptions

• Opinion pieces do not need fact-checking. Every fact in an editorial, column or review must be accurate. Only the conclusions are opinion.
• An editorial is one writer's opinion. An editorial represents the publication, decided by a majority of its editorial board. A signed column is one writer's view.
• A fair editorial gives both sides equal space. An editorial argues one side. Fairness means stating the other side accurately and answering it, not splitting the difference.
• Labels solve the confusion between news and opinion. Labels are necessary, but Pew's research suggests many readers still struggle to tell fact from opinion, which is why many publications also keep the two physically and editorially separate.

The short version

• The Sun's 1897 reply to Virginia O'Hanlon is the most reprinted editorial in English; her father's trust in "The Sun" shows how readers can blur news and opinion.
• William Allen White's 1896 editorial built a partisan argument on a reported fact: editorials may take sides but may not get facts wrong.
• Editorials speak for the publication's board; columns, op-eds, reviews and letters speak for their authors. All opinion must be labeled.
• Against publishing opinion: Pew found readers distinguish fact from opinion only a little better than chance, and Bezos ended Post endorsements citing a perception of bias. For: labeled opinion serves communities, and the backlash to the Post's decision showed how many journalists value it.
• A strong editorial is reported first, states its position early, answers the best counterargument and asks for a specific action.
• Reviews need clear criteria and evidence; reviewers and columnists must avoid or disclose conflicts of interest.

Sources

1. Church, F. P. (1897, September 21). Is there a Santa Claus? The Sun (New York). Wikisource.
2. White, W. A. (1896, August 15). What's the matter with Kansas? Emporia Gazette. Wikisource.
3. Mitchell, A., Gottfried, J., Barthel, M., and Sumida, N. (2018, June 18). Distinguishing between factual and opinion statements in the news. Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center.
4. CNN Business. (2024, October 28). Jeff Bezos defends Washington Post non-endorsement after subscribers flee and staffers resign. Via KVIA. KVIA.
5. Journalism Education Association. (2013). JEA model editorial policy. JEA.

150,000 copies of a wrong headline

On election night in November 1948, the first edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press with a banner headline across its front page: "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." The paper's typesetters were on strike, and its workaround for setting type required the paper to go to press hours earlier than usual, before most states had reported their results. The Tribune relied instead on the prediction of its veteran Washington correspondent and on polls that almost all expected Thomas Dewey to win. About 150,000 copies had been printed before the paper changed the headline for a later edition.

President Harry Truman won. On November 4, 1948, at the train station in St. Louis, a photographer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat caught Truman grinning and holding up a copy of the Tribune with the wrong headline. The Truman Library holds that photograph; it is still copyrighted, so follow the link to see it rather than copying it.

The headline is the most-read sentence in any story, and often the most hurried. Here it said something the reporting could not support, because the votes had not been counted. Every rule in this lesson comes back to the same test: can the story, and the facts behind it, support every word in the headline?

What a headline has to do

A headline tells readers what the story is about, quickly enough for them to decide whether to read it. Glencoe's high school textbook Journalism Today sums up the limits: headlines "should be informative, lively, and interesting, but they should never promise something that isn't in the story." NPR's training team puts the same idea positively. The best headlines, writes NPR's Eric Athas, "aren't necessarily the ones that make people click," but "the ones that promise great stories and then fulfill that promise." His guide adds that headlines should be specific, easy to understand, not overly clever, and true to the spirit of the story.

Headlines also have their own grammar, developed to fit the most meaning into the least space. The conventions most American newsrooms share:

Glencoe's textbook names the first and third conventions directly: active verbs in the present tense, with no articles. Athas's guide warns against words that almost only appear in headlines, such as mull and bolster; editors call that vocabulary "headlinese."

Procedure: headlining the late bus story

Step 1. Find the news in the lede. "The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, starting Jan. 6 to save $86,000 a year." The core is: board, ends, Friday late bus.

Step 2. Build subject, verb, object. "Board ends Friday late bus." True and clear, but it could be sharper about who is affected.

Step 3. Add the most important specific. "Board cuts Friday late bus used by 140 students." The number tells readers how much this matters.

Step 4. Test every word against the story. Did the board cut it? It voted to end it starting Jan. 6, so it has not stopped yet. "Board votes to end Friday late bus" is more exact. Does the story say 140? Yes, as an estimate from the transportation director, so "about 140" belongs in the story, and "140" in a headline is acceptable only because the story explains it.

Step 5. Write a deck. A deck is a smaller second headline that adds detail: "Vote is 4-3; about 140 students ride it each week."

Step 6. Write a search headline. Online, the headline also has to make sense alone in a search result or a social post, with no photo or deck beside it. NPR's training team publishes a "recipe" for writing both a display headline and a search headline when a site needs both. A search version uses the words people would search for: "Lakeview school board votes to end Friday late bus to save $86,000."

Key idea: Write the headline from the lede, then test every word against the story. If any word goes beyond what you reported, change the word, not the facts.

Run it again: when the facts change or are uncertain

The next day the superintendent says the district will apply for a grant that could restore the bus by March. The headline changes with the news: "District seeks grant to bring back Friday late bus." Notice the verb. "Seeks" is true today. "District will restore late bus" would repeat the Tribune's mistake by announcing an outcome that has not happened. When a claim is uncertain or comes from one source, attribute it in the headline: "Grant could restore late bus by March, superintendent says."

Clickbait and the broken promise

Clickbait is a headline that withholds or exaggerates the news to get clicks: "You won't believe what the school board just did." Athas argues against being mysterious just to make people click, because readers who feel tricked do not come back. Question headlines have a similar problem when the story cannot answer the question: "Is the late bus gone forever?" invites "maybe" as the answer. A headline is a promise. If the story cannot keep it, rewrite the headline.

Some words carry extra weight. "Arrested" and "cited" are different events. "Charged" and "accused" are different legal stages. "Cuts" and "votes to cut" are different facts. A headline that gets one of these wrong can harm a real person even if the story beneath it is accurate.

Captions: identify, explain, date

A caption, also called a cutline, is the text under a photo. The International Journalists' Network, a project of the International Center for Journalists, notes that captions are often among the first things readers read, and that the standard of accuracy for them "should be as high or higher than any other writing that appears in a publication." Its guidance, in short:

• The first sentence identifies the people and the place in the photo and gives the date. For more than one person, identify them from left to right. Spell every name correctly.
• Write the first sentence in the present tense, which gives the image immediacy. Later sentences can shift to the past tense if the context requires it.
• A second sentence gives context: why the moment matters.
• If the photo was taken earlier than the event in the story, say so; it is a "file photo."
• Be brief: usually one or two sentences.

The Truman Library's own description of the 1948 photograph works as a model of a first caption sentence: "President Harry S. Truman holds up the Chicago Tribune newspaper with the headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' at the train station in St. Louis, Missouri." Who, doing what, where, in the present tense, with the date recorded alongside: November 4, 1948. A second sentence would add the context: Truman had won the election two days earlier.

The habits that protect captions start when the photo is taken. Write down every person's name, with spelling, in left-to-right order, along with the time and place. Avoid stating the obvious ("A student smiles") or adding your opinion ("an amazing catch"), and avoid the word "poses" unless that is the news. Then check the caption against the photo itself: is the person you named on the left really on the left?

Common misconceptions

• A clever headline beats a clear one. NPR's guide warns against being overly clever. A pun that confuses readers loses them; clarity first, wit only if it helps.
• The headline can go a little beyond the story to draw readers in. That is how "Dewey Defeats Truman" happened. A headline may say less than the story, never more.
• Present tense is wrong for something that happened yesterday. In headlines it is the convention: "Board ends late bus."
• Nobody reads captions. Captions are often among the first words readers see, and a wrong name in one is among the most visible errors a publication can make.

What to carry forward

• The Tribune's 1948 headline went beyond the counted votes; about 150,000 copies were printed before it was fixed.
• A headline must be specific, easy to understand and supported by the story: "never promise something that isn't in the story."
• Headline grammar: present tense for the past, "to" plus a verb for the future, no articles, active verbs, figures, attribution for claims, no headlinese.
• Build the headline from the lede, test every word, add a deck, and write a search version that makes sense on its own.
• Avoid clickbait and questions the story cannot answer; choose legal and factual words exactly.
• Captions: identify everyone left to right, present tense first, date and place, a sentence of context, file photos labeled, every name checked.

Sources

1. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. (n.d.). President Harry S. Truman holds the "Dewey Defeats Truman" newspaper (photograph record 58-358, November 4, 1948; credit Pierce Hangge, St. Louis Globe-Democrat). Truman Library.
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Dewey Defeats Truman. Background on the strike, the early press time and the 150,000 copies. Wikipedia.
3. Athas, E. (n.d.). How to write great headlines that keep readers engaged. NPR Training. NPR.
4. Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. (n.d.). Journalism Today, Chapter 7 overview: Writing news stories and headlines. Glencoe.
5. International Journalists' Network. (n.d.). Writing photo captions. International Center for Journalists. IJNet.

A boy who never existed

On September 28, 1980, the Washington Post published "Jimmy's World," a story by the reporter Janet Cooke about an 8-year-old heroin addict in Washington. Cooke said "Jimmy" was a pseudonym and described watching adults inject him. Readers were horrified. The city's mayor ordered a police search for the boy, and no one could find him. The Post defended the story and entered it for the Pulitzer Prize, and on April 13, 1981, Cooke won the prize for feature writing.

The prize unraveled it. The Associated Press sent out a profile of each winner, and editors at the Toledo Blade, where Cooke had once worked, noticed that her biography claimed degrees she did not have. Questioned by her editors, Cooke admitted that Jimmy did not exist. The Post returned the prize. Its ombudsman, Bill Green, began his report to readers: "'Jimmy' never existed, but his story convulsed the city and humiliated The Washington Post."

Notice two connections to earlier lessons. A résumé claim exposed Cooke, just as résumé claims undid the principal in Pittsburg in Lesson 2. And the central person in her story was a composite or an invention, the line Lesson 11 told you never to cross. The deeper failure belonged to the system: editors published a story whose central subject none of them had verified.

The codes journalists write for themselves

The most widely cited code in American journalism is the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, last revised in 2014. You have met pieces of it already. It rests on four principles, each with a one-line summary that you can read in full:

Two sentences at the bottom of the code matter as much as anything in it. The code calls itself "not a set of rules, rather a guide," and says it is not, "nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable." No one can be fined or jailed for breaking it. Its force comes from journalists choosing to hold themselves to it, and from readers who notice when they do not.

Student journalism has its own versions. The National Scholastic Press Association's Model Code of Ethics (2019 edition) boils its standards down to seven commands: be responsible, be fair, be honest, be accurate, be independent, minimize harm, be accountable. It also states the difference between law and ethics in two short sentences worth memorizing: "What is legal may not be what is ethical. Having the right to say something doesn't make it right to say it." The Journalism Education Association's Scholastic Press Rights Commission publishes guidance on specific questions, such as getting consent and using anonymous sources, which you met in Lesson 4. The Student Press Law Center deals mainly with law, and it is careful to separate the two: on naming minors, for example, it concludes that the decision is an editorial and ethical choice rather than one dictated by law.

The point: Law tells you what you may publish. Ethics asks what you should publish. The SPJ code puts it plainly: legal access to information "differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast."

Five failures, mapped to the code

Codes are easiest to understand where they broke. Here are five of the best-documented failures in modern American journalism, from outlets with very different audiences and reputations.

Look at the details behind each row.

Jayson Blair. In 2003 a San Antonio Express-News reporter noticed that a New York Times story by Blair closely matched her own. The Times investigated its own reporter. According to the Associated Press, the initial review of the 73 articles Blair wrote between October 2002 and April 2003 found fraud, plagiarism and inaccuracies in 36. Blair resigned on May 1, the Times published a four-page account of what went wrong on May 11, and its executive editor and managing editor resigned on June 5.

CBS News. On September 8, 2004, two months before a presidential election, 60 Minutes Wednesday aired documents said to come from the personal file of President Bush's former Texas Air National Guard commander, suggesting Bush had received preferential treatment. Experts questioned the documents, and CBS could not authenticate them. An outside panel led by a former U.S. attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, and a former Associated Press chief executive, Louis Boccardi, blamed a "myopic zeal" among staff determined to be first with the story, though it found no evidence of political motivation. The panel wrote that "basic journalistic steps were not carried out." CBS fired the producer, Mary Mapes, and asked three executives to resign. The SPJ code anticipates exactly this: "Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy."

Rolling Stone. A 2014 article told the story of a student, called Jackie, who said she had been assaulted at a fraternity party. After other reporters found serious discrepancies, the magazine asked the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to review it. The review, by Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll and Derek Kravitz, called the story "a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable." The magazine never contacted the three friends Jackie said she called that night, never gave the fraternity the details it needed to respond, and never confirmed that the man she named existed. These were, the reviewers wrote, "basic, even routine" practices. The reviewers also pointed to confirmation bias: the writer believed the university mishandled assault cases, and Jackie's story seemed to confirm it. The magazine retracted the article on April 5, 2015.

Fox News. After the 2020 election, Fox programs broadcast claims that Dominion's voting machines had been rigged. Dominion sued for $1.6 billion. On April 18, 2023, just before trial, the parties settled for $787.5 million. NPR reported Fox's statement: "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false."

The patterns behind the failures

Read across the five cases and the same few weaknesses keep appearing.

• An unverified central source. Jimmy was never confirmed to exist. Jackie's account was never checked against the people she named.
• Speed and competition. The CBS panel's phrase, a zeal "to be first," describes a pressure every newsroom feels, including a student one racing a rumor on social media.
• Confirmation bias. The tendency to accept evidence that fits what you already believe. It appears in the Rolling Stone review, and the CBS panel described a producer who insufficiently questioned sources she wanted to believe.
• Systems that did not ask. Editors at every one of these outlets had the authority to say "prove it" and did not use it in time.
• Defending instead of correcting. CBS compounded its error with misleading statements in defense of the story. Fox's statement came only as part of a settlement.

None of these outlets was small, careless or new. That is the lesson. The protection against failure is not a famous name or a political reputation. It is method: verification, a real chance to respond, independence and correction, practiced every time.

Why this matters: No newsroom on any side is immune. The habits in this course are the safeguards these newsrooms failed to use.

Using a code to make a decision

A code does not decide for you; it organizes your thinking. When a story raises an ethical question, work through these steps:

1. State the question precisely: "Should we name the student?" "Should we run this photo?" "Can we use this source without a name?"
2. List everyone affected: the subject, their family, sources, readers, the school community, your publication.
3. Find the principles that apply, and notice where they pull against each other, such as seeking truth against minimizing harm.
4. Look for alternatives: another way to verify, a delay, leaving out a detail, a different photo.
5. Decide, and be ready to explain your decision to readers. If you would be embarrassed to explain it, reconsider it.

The next two lessons use this procedure on four of the hardest calls in student journalism.

Common misconceptions

• Ethics codes are laws. The SPJ code says it is not legally enforceable and cannot be. Its force comes from journalists who hold themselves to it.
• If something is legal to publish, it is ethical to publish. As the NSPA code says, having the right to say something doesn't make it right to say it.
• Famous newsrooms have systems that make these failures impossible. The Post, the Times, CBS, Rolling Stone and Fox all had editors, lawyers and fact-checkers. Systems only work when someone uses them.
• Ethical failures happen at outlets whose politics I dislike. The five cases come from outlets with very different audiences and reputations. Judge the method, not the masthead.

Putting it together

• The SPJ Code of Ethics (2014) rests on four principles: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. It is a guide, not a law.
• Student codes, such as the NSPA's Model Code of Ethics, adapt these principles; law and ethics are different questions.
• "Jimmy's World" (1980), Jayson Blair (2003), CBS's Guard documents (2004), Rolling Stone's UVA story (2014) and Fox's Dominion claims (2020-2023) each broke the duty to seek truth, and several broke the duty to be accountable.
• The common weaknesses: unverified central sources, speed, confirmation bias, editors who did not ask, and defending instead of correcting.
• Use a code as a decision tool: state the question, list who is affected, weigh the principles, look for alternatives, decide and explain.

Sources

1. Society of Professional Journalists. (2014). SPJ Code of Ethics. SPJ.
2. National Scholastic Press Association. (2019). Model code of ethics (August 2019 edition). Minneapolis, MN: NSPA.
3. Green, B. (1981, April). Janet's world: The story of a child who never existed, how and why it came to be published. The Washington Post. Washington Post.
4. Associated Press. (2003, June 12). NY Times finds more bogus Blair reports. Editor and Publisher. Editor and Publisher.
5. Arizona State University, Cronkite School. (2014, November). The Jayson Blair affair. History, Headlines and Highlights. ASU Cronkite.
6. Independent review of CBS Bush report scathing. (2005, January 11). Lawrence Journal-World. Lawrence Journal-World.
7. Coronel, S., Coll, S., and Kravitz, D. (2015, April 5). Rolling Stone's investigation: "A failure that was avoidable." Columbia Journalism Review. CJR.
8. Folkenflik, D., and Yang, M. (2023, April 18). Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. NPR. NPR.

Two newspapers, one name

On February 9, 1978, a 15-year-old student was shot and killed at Hayes Junior High School in St. Albans, West Virginia, a small town outside Charleston. Seven eyewitnesses identified the alleged shooter, a 14-year-old classmate, and police arrested him soon afterward. Reporters from Charleston's two daily newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Gazette, heard about the shooting on the police radio, drove to the school and learned the boy's name simply by asking witnesses, police officers and an assistant prosecutor.

West Virginia law at the time made it a crime for a newspaper to publish the name of a young person in a juvenile case without a court's permission. The two papers made opposite choices. The Daily Mail left the name out of its first story. The next morning, the Gazette printed both the name and a picture. Radio stations broadcast the name too, and once it was public, the Daily Mail printed it that afternoon. Both papers were indicted.

The case reached the Supreme Court as Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co. On June 26, 1979, the Court held that the state could not, consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, "punish the truthful publication of an alleged juvenile delinquent's name lawfully obtained by a newspaper." The state's interest in protecting a young offender's anonymity was real, the Court said, but not strong enough to justify punishing the press.

So the law answered the question of whether the newspapers could publish the name. It said nothing about whether they should. On the first day, two experienced newsrooms looked at the same facts and decided differently. That gap between legal and right is where this lesson lives. You will work through two of the hardest calls in student journalism, and each has strong reasons on both sides.

Hard call 1: naming a student

What the law says. In general, no law stops a student publication from naming a minor when the information is true and was lawfully obtained. The Student Press Law Center's guide "Naming names" calls the belief that juveniles' names are off-limits a misconception. It notes that the federal student privacy law, FERPA, binds schools, not student journalists, and that juvenile court records are often closed, so the main limits come from how you get the information. Its conclusion is that naming a minor is an editorial and ethical choice, not one dictated by law.

The case for naming. Names are facts, and accurate reporting includes them. In a school, an unnamed story about a student's arrest invites guessing, and the guesses may land on the wrong person. Some stories, such as a threat to public safety or a case where a minor is charged as an adult, carry a public interest strong enough to justify the harm. And leaving names out of positive stories, such as awards, sports or achievements, serves no one.

The case against. The SPJ code asks journalists to "use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles" and to "consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication." A 15-year-old's worst day, once published online, can follow them into college applications and job interviews. The juvenile justice system itself is built on the idea that young people can change, which is why many states keep juvenile cases private. The JEA's guidance adds that "publishing the names of victims of a crime may be traumatizing," and that a minor may not grasp the risks of being named.

Four questions to decide. The SPLC's guide recommends weighing four questions drawn from Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute: Who is served by identifying the juvenile? How newsworthy is the story? What is the juvenile's history? Would others be harmed if the minor were not named, or if rumors went unchecked?

Here is how many student publications apply those questions. These are policies, not laws, and your publication may draw the lines differently.

What matters here: The law usually lets you name a minor. The decision is still yours, and it should come from weighing who is served against who is harmed, with a written policy you apply the same way every time.

Hard call 2: a photograph of grief

The National Press Photographers Association's Code of Ethics sets the bar for photographs of private sorrow: "Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see." Two famous photographs show how differently that bar can be read.

A couple on a beach, 1954. On April 2, 1954, a 19-month-old boy wandered from his family's home in Hermosa Beach, California, and disappeared into the ocean. John L. Gaunt, a Los Angeles Times photographer who lived nearby, ran to the beach and photographed the boy's parents, John and Lillian McDonald, standing at the water's edge holding each other. He later recalled taking the picture from roughly 200 feet away. The Times published it the next day, and in 1955 it won the Pulitzer Prize for photography; the jury called it "poignant and profoundly moving." Gaunt did not approach the couple: they were in a public place, and he photographed them from a distance. But they did not choose to have their worst moment become a celebrated image.

A child on a beach, 2015. On September 2, 2015, Nilüfer Demir, a photographer for Turkey's DHA news agency, photographed the body of a Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, lying face down at the water's edge near Bodrum after the boat carrying his family sank. Her editor, Uğur Cebeci, decided to distribute the photos uncensored. "Which part should we censor?" he asked later, adding that it was "too late for us to ask this innocent child for permission." News organizations around the world then had to decide for themselves.

The case for publishing. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, who shared the image early, argued that "it was important to shock the world," because shocking things were happening in the Mediterranean. Research supports the claim that the photograph mattered. A 2017 study by the psychologist Paul Slovic and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported behavioral data showing that this single photo of one child had more impact than statistical reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria.

The case against, or for restraint. The same study found that the "newly created empathy waned rather quickly." A dead child cannot consent, and the family had to see the image everywhere. The Guardian's picture editor, Fiona Shields, described the balance editors felt: it is "really important to highlight the severity of the situation," but "you also don't want to repel your readers." Editors made different choices: some ran the starkest image on the front page, some chose a different, less graphic photograph from the same scene, and some declined to publish the images at all.

What would settle it? This dispute is mostly about values, so evidence cannot end it. But evidence narrows it. Slovic's study shows such images can move people, briefly. The NPPA's test asks whether the public's need is "overriding." Between "publish everything" and "publish nothing" lie real alternatives: a less graphic frame, a smaller size, a warning, asking the family, or waiting.

Remember: A grief photo can be the truest picture of a story and the cruelest one. Ask whether readers truly need to see it, whether there is a less intrusive way to show it, and how you would explain the choice to the family.

The student-press version

At a school, these calls are personal. When a student dies, the grieving family and friends are your readers and your classmates. Many student publications follow practices like these: photograph a vigil only with organizers' permission and from a respectful distance; do not photograph or quote crying students without their consent; contact the family, through the school if necessary, before publishing anything about the student beyond the basic facts; and run a memorial story only with the family's knowledge. When in doubt, publish less, and explain why.

Common misconceptions

• It is illegal to publish a minor's name. In Smith v. Daily Mail, the Supreme Court held a state could not punish the truthful publication of a juvenile's name that was lawfully obtained. The decision is usually ethical, not legal.
• FERPA stops student papers from naming students. FERPA governs schools' release of education records. It does not bind student journalists who get information independently.
• If a name or photo is already on social media, publishing it does no harm. Publication by a news organization adds credibility, reach and permanence. "Everyone already knows" is a reason to weigh, not a reason to skip the weighing.
• Publishing a photograph of grief is always exploitation. "Tragedy by the Sea" won a Pulitzer, and the Kurdi photo moved the public, at least for a while. The question is need, intrusion and alternatives, case by case.

Where this leaves us

• In 1978 two Charleston newspapers made opposite choices about naming a 14-year-old suspect. The Supreme Court later held that a state cannot punish the truthful publication of a lawfully obtained juvenile's name.
• Law usually allows naming minors; ethics asks whether you should. Use Poynter's four questions and a written policy applied consistently.
• Never name victims of sexual assault, and get documented consent, including a parent's when needed, for private personal stories.
• The NPPA allows intruding on grief only for an "overriding and justifiable need to see."
• The 1954 "Tragedy by the Sea" and the 2015 Kurdi photo show grief photos can be honored and influential; research found the Kurdi photo's effect was powerful but brief.
• Look for alternatives between all and nothing: a less graphic frame, smaller placement, warnings, family contact, delay.

Sources

1. Smith v. Daily Mail Publishing Co., 443 U.S. 97 (1979). Case summary and opinion. Oyez.
2. Student Press Law Center. (2020, January 29; updated 2020, October 5). Naming names: Identifying minors. SPLC.
3. Bowen, J. (2015, April 7). Treatment of minors. Journalism Education Association. JEA.
4. National Press Photographers Association. (2004). NPPA Code of Ethics. NPPA.
5. Abu-Fadil, M. (n.d.). A sea of pictures: The ethics debate on how media handle photos. Ethical Journalism Network. Ethical Journalism Network.
6. Slovic, P., Västfjäll, D., Erlandsson, A., and Gregory, R. (2017). Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(4), 640-644. PubMed.
7. Harnisch, L. (2007, October 27). Tribute to Jack Gaunt. The Daily Mirror (Los Angeles history blog). The Daily Mirror. Details of the photograph from Wikipedia, "Tragedy by the Sea."

A story that fell apart in a day

On a Thursday morning, the Lakeview Ledger, the student news site of the invented school from earlier lessons, posted this story. It is written for this course, but every mistake in it has been made by real newsrooms.

PRINCIPAL TO BAN BACKPACKS. Lakeview High School will ban backpacks starting next month, according to a source close to the administration. The source, who asked not to be named, said the decision was final and that students would have to carry books by hand. "It's happening, trust me," the source said. Principal Angela Ruiz could not be reached for comment.

By lunch, half the school was angry. By 3 p.m. the principal's office had emailed families: there was no backpack ban. The only change under discussion was a clear-bag rule at home football games, the same rule used at many stadiums, and nothing had been decided. That evening the Ledger added a line to the bottom of its story: "An earlier version of this story contained an error."

Count the failures. There are at least six, and each traces back to a decision someone made before publishing.

Tracing the failures

1. Anonymity for no good reason. The SPJ code tells journalists to "reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere." The source faced no danger, and the information could have been obtained by asking the principal. The Journalism Education Association's guidance for student journalists starts from the same place: seek "sources willing to speak on the record," and use unnamed sources "sparingly."

2. A source with no direct knowledge. "Close to the administration" turned out to mean a student who had overheard a teacher. The Associated Press's standards, as summarized by the News Literacy Project in Lesson 4, allow anonymous material only when the source is reliable and in a position to have accurate information, and only when the material is information rather than opinion or speculation. "It's happening, trust me" is neither.

3. No one asked why. The JEA's guidance tells reporters to ask why a source wants anonymity, whether the source could be in danger, and whether there is another way to get the information. The Ledger asked none of these.

4. No second source and no record. A school policy change leaves a trail: a draft, an agenda item, an email to staff. The reporter checked none of it.

5. A token attempt at a response. "Could not be reached" after one unanswered email at 7 p.m. is not a real chance to respond. The SPJ code asks journalists to "diligently seek" the subjects of coverage.

6. A buried, vague correction. "An earlier version of this story contained an error" does not say what the error was, and readers who saw the headline will never see the line at the bottom. The SPJ code asks journalists to "acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently" and to "explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly."

Why this matters: Every one of these failures was a choice made before publication. Anonymity is a privilege a newsroom grants for a reason it can state, not a default for any source who prefers it.

When anonymity is justified: Watergate

The most famous anonymous source in American journalism shows what a justified case looks like. In 1972 and 1973, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post reported on the break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters in the Watergate building and the cover-up that followed, reporting that contributed to President Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974. One of their key sources, known in the newsroom as "Deep Throat," met Woodward in a parking garage and confirmed or steered their reporting.

On May 31, 2005, more than 30 years later, Vanity Fair revealed that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI during the investigation, then 91 years old. Woodward and Bernstein had promised to keep his name secret until his death and had kept the promise until he identified himself. Ben Bradlee, the Post's executive editor at the time, said Felt's senior position meant "I knew the paper was on the right track."

Check Felt against the SPJ test. He faced real danger to his career and possibly legal consequences. His information could not be obtained elsewhere, since he was inside the investigation. He had direct knowledge. And the reporters kept their promise, which the SPJ code also requires: "be cautious when making promises, but keep the promises they make."

When anonymity goes wrong: the Times and Iraq

Anonymous sources can also lead a great newspaper astray. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the New York Times published prominent stories about Iraq's supposed weapons programs. The paper later said the stories depended "at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq," and that U.S. officials eagerly confirmed many of their accounts. The claims in those stories were never independently verified. On May 26, 2004, the Times published an editors' note acknowledging that some of its coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." According to the note, as described by the journalist Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, accounts from Iraqi defectors were not examined with enough skepticism, and "articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display" while follow-up articles that questioned them "were sometimes buried."

Massing also noted where the note itself ran: at the bottom of page A10, while the stories it addressed had been prominent. A correction placed less prominently than the error it corrects repeats the Ledger's mistake on a national scale.

The point: Anonymous sources are not good or bad in themselves. What matters is whether the source has direct knowledge, faces real risk, has information unavailable elsewhere, and whether editors know who the source is and test what the source says.

A policy for student newsrooms

Combining the SPJ and JEA guidance gives a workable policy:

1. Try to get the information on the record first, and from documents.
2. Grant anonymity only if the source faces real harm and has firsthand information you cannot get another way.
3. The editor must know the source's identity. The JEA notes that many student staffs keep the adviser out of this loop, to protect the adviser's position at the school.
4. Confirm the information with at least one other source or document.
5. In the story, describe the source as specifically as you safely can and explain why anonymity was granted: "a teacher who asked not to be named because she was not authorized to discuss personnel decisions."
6. Never use an anonymous source to attack someone's character, and never let one speculate.
7. Think through the legal risk, as the JEA advises, including what you would do if a court demanded the source's name. Lesson 18 covers where to get legal help.

Corrections: say what was wrong, prominently

Every newsroom makes mistakes. What separates a trustworthy one is how it corrects them. Know the types:

Here is how the Ledger should have corrected its story, at the top, where the error appeared:

Correction: An earlier version of this story, based on an unnamed student source, reported that Lakeview High School will ban backpacks next month. That was wrong. No backpack ban has been proposed. The school is considering a clear-bag rule for spectators at home football games, and no decision has been made, Principal Angela Ruiz said Thursday. The source did not have direct knowledge of the plan and should not have been granted anonymity. We regret the error.

It says what was wrong, what is right, how the error happened and what the source of the correct information is. It also changes the headline. A correction that only says "an error was corrected" protects the newsroom, not the reader.

The newest dispute: updating or unpublishing old stories

Some errors are not errors at all. A story about an arrest is accurate on the day it runs, but the charges may be dropped years later while the story still shows up whenever someone searches the person's name. In January 2021, the Boston Globe launched Fresh Start, which lets anyone ask the paper to review older stories about them. The Globe says it considers each request individually and may update a story with new information or remove it from Google searches, with editors making the final decision. "We are not in the business of rewriting the past," the paper wrote, "but we don't want to stand in the way of a regular person's ability to craft their future." Cleveland.com, the site of the Plain Dealer, started a similar program in 2018 but will not act on stories about violence, felony sex crimes or corruption, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Supporters point to the harm: Deborah Dwyer, a fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism who studies the trend, told the Monitor that "just because we have information about a person's past does not mean that we have to use that information to judge them today." Skeptics see a different risk, which the Monitor's own headline captured: "Fresh start or a cover-up?" A newspaper's archive is a public record, and quietly removing stories could hide information the public is entitled to, especially about people with power. That is why programs like these draw lines around serious crimes and public figures, and why most prefer updating a story to deleting it. The SPJ code points the same way: "Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story."

Common misconceptions

• Granting anonymity is fine whenever a source asks for it. The SPJ code reserves it for sources at risk of harm who have information unavailable elsewhere, and asks you to explain why it was granted.
• Anonymous sources are always untrustworthy. Watergate depended on one. The question is the source's knowledge, risk and motives, and whether editors tested the information.
• A correction at the bottom of the story is enough. The SPJ code asks for prominent corrections. A correction should be as visible as the error and say exactly what was wrong.
• Deleting an inaccurate story is the cleanest fix. Deleting erases the record of the error and the correction. Most newsrooms correct and update instead, and unpublishing is reserved for narrow cases.

What you now know

• The Ledger's backpack story failed six ways: needless anonymity, a secondhand source, no questions about motive, no second source, no real chance to respond and a buried, vague correction.
• Anonymity is justified only for sources facing real harm, with firsthand information unavailable elsewhere; editors must know who they are, and the story should say why anonymity was granted.
• Mark Felt, revealed in 2005 as Deep Throat, met that test; the Times' prewar Iraq coverage, which it said in 2004 "was not as rigorous as it should have been," shows how unnamed sources with agendas can mislead.
• Corrections should be prompt, prominent and specific: what was wrong, what is right and how it happened.
• Requests to update or unpublish old stories pit second chances against the public record; programs such as the Globe's Fresh Start decide case by case and exclude serious crimes and public figures.

Sources

1. Society of Professional Journalists. (2014). SPJ Code of Ethics. SPJ.
2. Bowen, J. (2015, April 7). Unnamed sources. Journalism Education Association, Scholastic Press Rights Commission. JEA.
3. NPR. (2005, May 31). 'Deep Throat' revealed as ex-FBI official Felt. NPR.
4. Massing, M. (2004, June 24). Unfit to print? The New York Review of Books. New York Review of Books.
5. Agence France-Presse. (2004, May 26). US paper apologises for WMD reports. Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera.
6. The Boston Globe. (2021, January 22). The Globe's Fresh Start initiative: Submit your appeal. Boston Globe.
7. Humphries, S. (2021, February 8). Papers rethink past crime reporting: Fresh start or a cover-up? The Christian Science Monitor. Christian Science Monitor.

Forty-seven volumes and a Sunday paper

In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a secret history of American decision-making in Vietnam. The finished study, officially the "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," ran to about 7,000 pages, according to the National Archives, and the justices who later ruled on it referred to its 47 volumes. It covered more than 20 years of policy, and much of it was classified. One of the analysts who worked on it, Daniel Ellsberg, came to believe the public had been deceived about the war, and in 1971 he gave copies to reporters.

The New York Times spent months examining the documents. On Sunday, June 13, 1971, it published the first article in a series about what became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon administration went to court to stop further publication, and the courts temporarily barred the Times from publishing more of the series while the case was decided. When the Washington Post began publishing its own stories from the papers, the government sued the Post too.

The cases moved at a speed courts rarely see. The two appeals courts ruled on June 23. The newspapers and the government filed in the Supreme Court on June 24. The justices heard argument on Saturday, June 26, and decided on June 30, 1971, seventeen days after the first article. The question was the oldest one in press law: can the government stop a newspaper from publishing?

Forty-five words

The press freedom clause sits inside a single sentence, ratified in 1791 as the First Amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Two things in that sentence shape everything in this module.

First, look at the subject: "Congress shall make no law." The First Amendment restrains government, not private individuals or companies. Through the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, it now restrains state and local governments as well, and that includes public schools, which are run by government. It does not restrain a private company that deletes your post, a private school that edits its newspaper, or a newspaper owner who refuses to print your letter. Lawyers call this the state action requirement: a First Amendment claim needs a government actor.

Second, look at the word "abridging." Courts have long distinguished two ways government can abridge the press. It can stop publication before it happens, which is called prior restraint: a license requirement, a court order forbidding a story, a censor who reads copy before it prints. Or it can punish a publication afterward, through a libel judgment or a criminal prosecution. The Supreme Court has treated prior restraint as the more dangerous of the two, because it keeps the public from ever seeing the speech and judging it.

Remember: The First Amendment limits government, including public schools. And of all the ways government can interfere with the press, stopping publication in advance is the one courts trust least.

Near v. Minnesota: the gag law case

The modern law of prior restraint begins with an unlovely newspaper. In 1927, a Minneapolis weekly called the Saturday Press published a series of articles charging, in the Supreme Court's words, "that a Jewish gangster was in control of gambling, bootlegging, and racketeering in Minneapolis," and that the police chief, the county attorney and the mayor were failing to stop it. The paper's attacks extended to Jewish people as a group. Under a 1925 Minnesota law that allowed courts to shut down a "malicious, scandalous and defamatory newspaper" as a public nuisance, a court ordered the Saturday Press to stop publishing.

On June 1, 1931, the Supreme Court struck the law down, 5-4, in Near v. Minnesota. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that it had been "generally, if not universally, considered that it is the chief purpose of the guaranty to prevent previous restraints upon publication." Then he wrote the sentence that every press-freedom case since has leaned on:

The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy, consistent with constitutional privilege.

In plain words: a newspaper that lies can be sued or punished afterward, but government may not silence it in advance. Hughes also noted narrow exceptions. "No one would question," he wrote, that in wartime a government "might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops," and he mentioned obscenity and incitement to violence as well.

Notice who won. The first great victory for press freedom in the Supreme Court protected a bigoted, scandal-mongering paper. That is not an accident. Rules that protect only admirable publications protect nothing, because officials decide who is admirable.

The Pentagon Papers decision

Forty years later, the Court applied Near to the most powerful newspaper in the country and the most powerful government in the world. In a short unsigned opinion, called a per curiam, the Court ruled 6-3 for the Times and the Post. It quoted its own earlier cases: "Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity," and the government "thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint." The lower courts had found the government had not met that burden. "We agree," the Court said.

Each of the nine justices also wrote his own opinion, and they show how differently they saw it.

• Justice Hugo Black would have ruled that the press could never be restrained at all: "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors," he wrote, and "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."
• Justice Potter Stewart set a narrower test. He wrote that he could not say disclosure of any of the documents "will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people." A restraint might be allowed if that standard were met; here it was not.
• The three dissenters, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices John Marshall Harlan and Harry Blackmun, objected above all to the speed. Harlan called the litigation a "frenzied train of events." Burger wrote that the cases had been "conducted in unseemly haste," noting that the Times had held the documents "for three to four months" while the courts were given only days to weigh claims about national security.

The decision did not say the press may publish anything at all, or that publishers and sources can never be prosecuted afterward. It said that this government, on this record, had not justified stopping these newspapers in advance. That is how the protection usually works: not as an absolute, but as a presumption so strong that the government almost never overcomes it.

Why this matters: Prior restraint is the rule student journalists meet most often, in the form of an administrator who wants to approve or kill a story before it runs. The next lesson shows why the answer for student media can be different, and what state laws have done about it.

What the cases do not protect

Read the limits as carefully as the protections.

• Publication can still bring consequences afterward: libel suits for false and damaging statements (Lesson 19), privacy claims and copyright claims (Lesson 20).
• The narrow exceptions Near mentioned, such as troop movements in wartime, remain.
• The First Amendment does not stop a private employer, private school or private platform from controlling what it publishes.
• The protection for publishing is not a protection for every way of getting information. Reporters must still obey laws on trespass, recording and theft.

This lesson and the rest of Module 7 give general information about the law, not legal advice. If you face a specific legal question as a student journalist, the Student Press Law Center offers free legal help, which Lesson 18 explains.

Common misconceptions

• The First Amendment means anyone can say anything anywhere. It limits government, not private companies, private schools or individuals, and it allows punishment after publication for things like libel.
• The Pentagon Papers case made all prior restraints unconstitutional. It reaffirmed a heavy presumption against them. Justice Stewart's opinion described the kind of grave, immediate harm that might justify one.
• Free-press cases are won by admirable newspapers. Near protected an antisemitic scandal sheet. The principle protects the press as a whole precisely by not depending on whether officials approve of a publication.
• If the government classifies a document, publishing it is automatically illegal. The Court refused to stop publication of classified documents in 1971. Other laws can still apply to how documents are obtained, which is why legal advice matters.

Looking back

• The First Amendment's 45 words forbid laws "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Through the Fourteenth Amendment they bind states and public schools, but not private actors.
• Prior restraint, stopping publication in advance, is the form of interference courts trust least; punishment after publication is treated as the normal remedy for abuse.
• Near v. Minnesota (1931) struck down Minnesota's "gag law," even though the paper involved was a bigoted scandal sheet, and named narrow exceptions such as troop movements.
• In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Court ruled 6-3 that the government had not met the "heavy burden" needed to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers.
• Black would have barred all prior restraints; Stewart required proof of direct, immediate and irreparable harm; the dissenters objected to the haste.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). The Bill of Rights: A transcription. National Archives.
2. Near v. Minnesota ex rel. Olson, 283 U.S. 697 (1931). Legal Information Institute.
3. New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). Legal Information Institute.
4. National Archives. (n.d.). Pentagon Papers. National Archives.

A black armband, December 1965

In December 1965, a group of adults and students in Des Moines, Iowa, met at the home of one family, the Eckhardts. They planned a quiet protest against the Vietnam War: they would wear black armbands to school during the holiday season. The city's school principals heard about the plan. On December 14 they adopted a policy. Any student wearing an armband would be asked to remove it, and a student who refused would be suspended until coming back without it. On December 16, 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker and 16-year-old Christopher Eckhardt wore armbands to school. The next day 15-year-old John Tinker did the same. All three were sent home and suspended.

Their case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, reached the Supreme Court. On February 24, 1969, the Court ruled for the students by a vote of 7-2. Justice Abe Fortas wrote one of the most quoted sentences in American law. It can hardly be argued, he wrote, that students or teachers "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

That sentence is where student press law begins. It is not where it ends. Three later cases narrowed, sharpened and extended it, and each one matters to what you can publish.

Four cases, side by side

Read the four cases in that order and you can see the law's shape. Tinker gives broad protection. Hazelwood makes a large exception for school-sponsored work, and Morse makes a small one for promoting drugs. Mahanoy renews protection off campus.

Tinker: the protective baseline

The Court in Tinker did not say students can say anything at school. It said officials need a real reason. They may forbid expression that would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school." But "undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression." Undifferentiated means vague and general. The armbands were "a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance."

The Court also noticed something that should catch a reporter's eye. Students in some Des Moines schools had worn buttons about national political campaigns. Some had even worn the Iron Cross, "traditionally a symbol of Nazism." The armband order did not reach those. The school had singled out one opinion. "Students in school as well as out of school are 'persons' under our Constitution," Fortas wrote.

Justice Hugo Black dissented. If students could "defy and flout orders of school officials," he warned, it would be "the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary." His fear, that the ruling would weaken schools' authority, is one side of a debate that runs through every case in this lesson.

Hazelwood: when the school is the publisher

Hazelwood East High School, in St. Louis County, Missouri, published a newspaper called Spectrum. It was written and edited by the school's Journalism II class. The school's practice was for the journalism teacher to send the principal page proofs of each issue before publication. This is called prior review. When the proofs of the May 13, 1983, issue reached the principal, Robert Eugene Reynolds, he objected to two stories.

One story described three students' experiences with pregnancy. It used false names, but he worried the students might still be identified from the text. He also believed its references to sexual activity and birth control were inappropriate for some of the younger students. The other story, on divorce, named a student who criticized her father in the proofs he saw, and he believed her parents should have had a chance to respond. Believing there was no time to make changes before the end of the school year, he withheld the two full pages on which the stories appeared. Other articles on those pages were lost too, and the paper ran four pages instead of six.

On January 13, 1988, the Supreme Court sided with the school, 5-3. Justice Byron White drew a line that has shaped student journalism ever since. Whether the First Amendment "requires a school to tolerate particular student speech," he wrote, is a different question from whether it "requires a school affirmatively to promote particular student speech." Tinker answered the first question. Hazelwood answered the second.

When the school is the publisher, as with a newspaper made in a class for credit, the rules change. The Court held that educators may exercise "editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities." Their actions must be "reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns." Pedagogical means related to teaching. The Court said a school could refuse to publish work that is "ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences."

Two details in Hazelwood matter enormously in practice.

• Forum status. The Court found Spectrum was not a public forum. School officials had not shown, "by policy or by practice," any intent to open its pages to "indiscriminate use" by its student reporters and editors. A publication that a school has opened to student expression, by written policy or long practice, may get Tinker's stronger protection even though the school sponsors it. That is why the Journalism Education Association's model policy declares the publication "a designated public forum for student editors." The same model says the publication "will not be reviewed or restrained by school officials prior to publication or distribution."
• College was left open. In a footnote, the Court said it "need not now decide" whether the same deference applies at the college and university level.

Justice William Brennan's dissent was fierce. The principal, he wrote, "objected to some material in two articles, but excised six entire articles." He had not tried alternatives such as small deletions, rearranging the layout or delaying publication. "Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official."

In short: Tinker protects students' own expression. Hazelwood lets a public school control expression it sponsors, for reasons related to teaching. The exceptions are a publication that is a public forum and a state law that restores stronger protection.

Morse: a narrow exception

On January 24, 2002, the Olympic torch relay passed in front of Juneau-Douglas High School in Juneau, Alaska, during school hours. Students were allowed to leave class to watch. As the torchbearers and camera crews passed, senior Joseph Frederick and his friends unfurled a 14-foot banner reading "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS." The principal, Deborah Morse, took the banner and suspended him for 10 days. On June 25, 2007, the Court ruled for the principal, 5-4. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote "that schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use."

The decision's reach depended on a concurrence by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Their votes were needed for a majority. Alito said the ruling covers only speech that "a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use." It "provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue." His examples included speech about "the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use." A student news story or editorial about drug policy is commentary, not advocacy of drug use.

Mahanoy: speech off campus

A student identified in court papers as B.L. attended Mahanoy Area High School in Pennsylvania. At the end of her freshman year, she learned she had not made the varsity cheerleading squad. That weekend, at a convenience store called the Cocoa Hut, she posted a Snapchat. It showed her and a friend with middle fingers raised, under a caption cursing school, softball, cheerleading and "everything." Her coaches suspended her from the junior varsity squad for the coming year.

On June 23, 2021, the Court ruled 8-1 for her. Justice Stephen Breyer described "three features of off-campus speech" that reduce a school's power over it. First, a school will "rarely stand in loco parentis," in place of the parent, when a student speaks off campus. Second, if schools could regulate off-campus speech too, they could regulate "all the speech a student utters during the full 24-hour day." Third, the school itself has an interest in protecting unpopular expression, because "America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy." The Court did not say schools can never act on off-campus speech, such as serious bullying or threats, but it made clear the leeway is much smaller.

New Voices: states that restored stronger protection

Because Hazelwood is a ruling about what the First Amendment requires, states remain free to give students more protection by law. The Student Press Law Center describes the New Voices movement as working to "counteract the impact of the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier Supreme Court decision." When this lesson was checked on October 18, 2026, the SPLC listed 18 states with such laws. They are Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. Minnesota became the 18th on May 17, 2024. The SPLC also notes that Virginia's law protects college students only. The District of Columbia and Pennsylvania have codes protecting student journalists.

The laws differ in their details, so compare two of them using the SPLC's summaries. Kansas's 1992 law, which protected the Pittsburg students in Lesson 2, lets officials restrict school-sponsored media only in narrow cases. The material must be libelous, slanderous or obscene, or encourage a crime or conduct that could get a student suspended or expelled, or create a material or substantial disruption. Minnesota's 2024 law covers public and charter school students in grades 6 through 12, but it leaves out yearbooks. It bars prior restraint of lawful student speech and requires every school board to have a written student media policy. Both laws protect advisers who refuse to censor their students. Check your own state's law on the SPLC's site rather than assuming.

Private schools

The First Amendment restrains government, so it does not protect students at private schools from their own school. The JEA's Kristin Taylor explained this in 2018. Faculty and staff at independent schools, she wrote, "are not representatives of the government, so they are not governed by the First Amendment." At that time she counted only two state laws protecting private high school students. One is California's Leonard Law, which does not apply to a school controlled by a religious organization when applying it would conflict with the organization's religious tenets. The other is a Rhode Island law passed in 2017. Elsewhere, private school students' freedom depends on their school's own policies, which student editors can ask their school to adopt.

Not legal advice, and where to get help

This lesson is general information about the law, not legal advice. The law varies by state, by school and by publication, and it changes. If you face censorship, a threat of discipline for what you published, or a legal question about a story, contact the Student Press Law Center. It offers student journalists and advisers a free legal hotline at splc.org/legalhelp. It also offers prepublication review and an attorney referral network. Its state guides say calls to the hotline are confidential unless and until you approve otherwise.

Common misconceptions

• Students have no free speech rights at school. Tinker says the opposite: students do not shed their rights "at the schoolhouse gate."
• Hazelwood lets principals censor anything in any student publication. It applies to school-sponsored expression that is not a public forum, requires a reason related to teaching, and is limited or overridden by New Voices laws in 18 states.
• Morse means schools can punish any speech that mentions drugs. The concurrence that made the majority said it does not reach commentary on political or social issues, such as drug policy.
• Schools can discipline students for anything they post online. Mahanoy sharply limited schools' power over students' off-campus speech, though not in every case.
• Private school students have the same rights as public school students. The First Amendment does not restrain private schools; only a few state laws and school policies protect their students.

Summing up

• Tinker (1969): students keep their rights at the schoolhouse gate; schools need evidence of material and substantial disruption, not undifferentiated fear.
• Hazelwood (1988): schools may control school-sponsored expression for legitimate pedagogical reasons, unless the publication is a public forum; the college question was left open.
• Morse (2007): schools may restrict speech reasonably seen as encouraging illegal drug use, but not political or social commentary.
• Mahanoy (2021): schools have much less leeway over off-campus speech; public schools are "the nurseries of democracy."
• New Voices laws in 18 states (SPLC, checked October 18, 2026) counteract Hazelwood; private schools are outside the First Amendment except where state law or policy says otherwise.
• This is general information, not legal advice; the SPLC's free legal hotline is the place to ask.

Sources

1. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). Legal Information Institute.
2. Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988). Legal Information Institute.
3. Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), opinion of the Court and concurrence of Justice Alito. Legal Information Institute.
4. Mahanoy Area School District v. B. L., No. 20-255 (U.S. June 23, 2021). Legal Information Institute.
5. Student Press Law Center. (n.d.). New Voices (accessed October 18, 2026). SPLC.
6. Student Press Law Center. (n.d.). Know your rights: Kansas and Know your rights: Minnesota. Kansas guide; Minnesota guide.
7. Journalism Education Association. (n.d.). JEA model editorial policy. JEA (PDF).
8. Taylor, K. (2018, October 30). Public or independent schools: Whose expression is protected is complex. Journalism Education Association. JEA.
9. Student Press Law Center. (n.d.). Legal help. SPLC.

A draft about the soccer coach

Late on a Wednesday, a sports reporter for the Lakeview Ledger files this draft. It was written for this course, and every person in it is invented.

Lakeview girls' soccer coach Rob Halvorsen has been stealing from his own team. Money from the September car wash fundraiser "disappeared," according to two players. One parent called Halvorsen "a liar who shouldn't be around kids." Halvorsen is also a terrible coach: the team is 2-9. Sources say the district is investigating.

The editor reads it twice. Every sentence might be true. But if any of it is false, the Ledger could be sued for libel, and a man's reputation could be damaged for years. This lesson gives you the questions to ask before a story like this runs. By the end, you will rewrite the draft so that it reports only what the paper can show.

What libel is

Defamation is a false statement of fact that harms someone's reputation. Libel is defamation in written or other fixed form, such as a printed page, a website or a recording. Slander is spoken defamation. Defamation is mainly a matter of state law, so the details vary from state to state. The Constitution, as the Supreme Court has read it, limits what states may do.

The Digital Media Law Project, a legal guide for journalists, lists what a person suing for defamation generally has to prove. Turn the list into questions and run the draft through them.

Notice what the list leaves out: the reporter's feelings about the coach. Truth sits at the center. As the Digital Media Law Project puts it, "The crux of a defamation claim is falsity." A true statement that harms someone's reputation is not libel, although Lesson 20 shows that publishing private facts can raise other problems. A story also does not have to be perfect in every detail. A statement that is substantially true, with only minor errors, generally is not libel.

New York Times v. Sullivan: room for error about officials

On March 29, 1960, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices." It described the civil rights movement in the South and ended with an appeal for funds, including for the legal defense of Martin Luther King Jr. Some of its statements about Montgomery, Alabama, were wrong. Students had sung the National Anthem at the state Capitol, not "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Nine students had been expelled, but for demanding service at a lunch counter, not for leading the Capitol protest. Police had been deployed near a college campus but had not "ringed" it. King had been arrested four times, not seven.

L. B. Sullivan was one of three elected commissioners of Montgomery, and he supervised the police department. The ad never named him. He argued that readers would take its statements about police as accusations against him. Alabama law at the time, as the Supreme Court described it, was harsh. A defendant had no defense unless it could persuade the jury that its statements "were true in all their particulars." An Alabama jury awarded Sullivan $500,000, the full amount he claimed.

On March 9, 1964, the Supreme Court reversed. Justice William Brennan wrote that the case had to be considered against "a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." That debate, he added, "may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." Mistakes come with it. "Erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate," the Court said, and it must be protected if free expression is to have the "breathing space" it needs. Forcing critics of officials to guarantee the truth of every factual claim would lead to "self-censorship."

So the Court set a new rule. A public official cannot win damages for a false statement about his official conduct unless he proves "actual malice." The Court defined it as publishing "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." The Times had not checked the ad against news stories in its own files. The Court said that showed "at most" negligence in failing to discover the errors, not actual malice.

The upshot: In law, actual malice has nothing to do with hating someone. It means the publisher knew a statement was false, or seriously doubted it and published anyway. That is very hard to prove, which is exactly why it protects the press.

Gertz: more protection for private people

Ten years later, the Court took up people who are not officials. In 1968 a Chicago police officer named Nuccio shot and killed a young man named Nelson, and Nuccio was later convicted of second-degree murder. The Nelson family hired a respected lawyer, Elmer Gertz, to sue the officer for damages. Gertz played no part in the criminal case.

A magazine called American Opinion was, in the Court's words, "a monthly outlet for the views of the John Birch Society." It had been warning of a nationwide plot to discredit local police. It printed an article portraying Gertz as an architect of a "frame-up" of the officer. It implied he had a criminal record, which was false, and labeled him a "Leninist" and a "Communist-fronter." Gertz sued for libel.

On June 25, 1974, the Court ruled that Gertz did not have to prove actual malice, because he was neither a public official nor a public figure. Justice Lewis Powell explained why private people deserve more protection. Officials and public figures "usually enjoy significantly greater access to the channels of effective communication," so they can answer false statements. They have also chosen to step into public life. A private person has done neither. The Court held that "so long as they do not impose liability without fault," states may set their own standard for libel of private people. Most states, the Digital Media Law Project reports, require a private person to prove only negligence, a failure to take reasonable care.

Gertz also described two kinds of public figures. A few people reach "such pervasive fame or notoriety" that they are public figures for all purposes. More commonly, a person "voluntarily injects himself or is drawn into a particular public controversy" and becomes a public figure only for that issue.

Who counts as public at your school?

Remember: When you are unsure, treat the person as a private figure. Then report carefully enough that no one could call your work negligent: documents, named sources, a real chance to respond and a careful edit. Work that meets that standard also clears the higher one.

Opinion is not a magic word: Milkovich

Mike Milkovich coached wrestling at Maple Heights High School in Ohio. In 1974 his team was involved in a fight at a home meet against Mentor High School, and several people were injured. The Ohio High School Athletic Association held a hearing, put the team on probation and censured the coach. Parents and wrestlers went to court, and a judge overturned the probation. Milkovich and the district superintendent, H. Don Scott, testified at both hearings.

The next day, a sports column by J. Theodore Diadiun ran in the News-Herald under the headline "Maple beat the law with the 'big lie.'" Anyone who attended the meet, the columnist wrote, "knows in his heart that Milkovich and Scott lied at the hearing after each having given his solemn oath to tell the truth." Milkovich sued. The newspaper argued that a column is opinion, and opinion cannot be libel.

The newspaper leaned on a line in Gertz: "Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea." On June 21, 1990, the Supreme Court rejected the argument, 7-2. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that the line was not meant to create "a wholesale defamation exemption for anything that might be labeled 'opinion.'" He gave an example. A speaker who says, "In my opinion John Jones is a liar," implies he knows facts showing that Jones lied. That statement "can cause as much damage to reputation as the statement, 'Jones is a liar.'" The column implied that Milkovich had committed perjury, the crime of lying under oath. That could be proved true or false by comparing his testimony at the two hearings. The Court sent the case back to the Ohio courts.

The Court also said what stays protected. A statement on a matter of public concern must be provable as false before a media defendant can be held liable. So "In my opinion Mayor Jones shows his abysmal ignorance by accepting the teachings of Marx and Lenin" would not be libel. Neither would "loose, figurative, or hyperbolic language" that no reader takes as a literal claim of fact. The Student Press Law Center offers a school example. "The coach should be replaced" is pure opinion. Add a false reason, such as a claim that he bought his college degree online, and the opinion label no longer protects you.

Key idea: Before an opinion runs, find the facts hiding inside it. State them, make sure they are true, and let readers draw their own conclusions. "The team is 2-9" is a checkable fact. "Halvorsen is a terrible coach" is an opinion built on it, and it belongs in a clearly labeled column, if anywhere.

Protections and traps

• Truth. The strongest defense. Proving truth usually means documents and named, firsthand sources.
• Fair report. An accurate, attributed report of what was said in an official proceeding or written in an official record is generally protected. The SPLC notes this usually holds even if the record later turns out to be wrong. That is one reason reporters cite police reports, court filings and board minutes.
• Pure opinion. Opinion that cannot be proved false is protected. Opinion that implies false facts is not.
• Repeating is publishing. Quoting someone else's false accusation does not protect you. For print, the SPLC's rule is blunt: "If you publish it, you own it." That covers letters to the editor too. Online, a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, gives a site some protection for comments posted by outsiders, but not for what its own staff writes.
• "Allegedly" is not a shield. Writing that someone "allegedly" stole, with no official charge behind it, still tells readers that he stole.

Fixing the draft

Go back to the soccer draft and test it one sentence at a time.

1. "Has been stealing from his own team." An accusation of a crime, stated as fact, with no evidence. Cut it. Report only what you can document.
2. Money "disappeared," according to two players. What exactly did they see? Ask them. Then ask the booster club's treasurer for the deposit records and the sign-up sheet.
3. A parent called him "a liar who shouldn't be around kids." When you print a quote, it becomes your statement too. It implies facts no one has shown. Cut it.
4. "A terrible coach." Opinion, in a news story. Cut it. The 2-9 record can stay if it matters to the story.
5. "Sources say the district is investigating." Which sources? Call the district and get a named spokesperson to confirm or deny it on the record.
6. Missing: the coach's side. Ask Halvorsen for a response, with enough detail and time to answer. Report what he says, or that he declined to comment.

Suppose the reporting turns up this: the club's deposit slip shows $1,140, but the sign-up sheet records $1,560 in payments, a gap of $420. The district confirms it is reviewing the fundraiser's records. The coach says he never handled the cash. Here is a rewrite, also written for this course:

The girls' soccer booster club cannot account for about $420 raised at its September car wash, according to club records and its treasurer, Paul Fenwick. Fenwick said the club's deposit slip shows $1,140, while the sign-up sheet records $1,560 in payments. District spokesperson Gail Pruitt confirmed Tuesday that the district is reviewing the fundraiser's records. She said no one has been accused of wrongdoing. Coach Rob Halvorsen said he never handled the cash. "Parents collected the money and gave it to the treasurer," he said.

The rewrite is less exciting and much stronger. Every fact has a source a reader can see. It accuses no one of a crime that no one has charged. The SPLC's Mike Hiestand makes the same point about a football coach who cannot account for $1,000 of the team's budget: the story does not need to call him "corrupt." His tips for hot stories add a few habits. Take careful notes, get the documents, never overstate the facts, and give the subject a real chance to respond. Have fresh eyes read the story before it runs, and treat complaints afterward with courtesy. If a question remains, call the SPLC's free legal hotline before you publish. This lesson is general information, not legal advice.

Common misconceptions

• A true story that hurts someone's reputation is libel. Libel requires a false statement of fact. Privacy is a separate question, covered in Lesson 20.
• Writing "allegedly" or "in my opinion" makes an accusation safe. Neither phrase removes the factual claim. Milkovich rejected the opinion label as a shield.
• If I am only quoting someone, the libel is theirs, not mine. Republishing a false, damaging statement can make the publisher liable too.
• Leaving out the name means no one can sue. Details, a title or a photo can identify a person as surely as a name.
• Actual malice means hatred or ill will. It means knowing a statement was false, or recklessly disregarding whether it was.

What to remember

• Libel is a published false statement of fact that identifies someone and harms their reputation, made with some level of fault.
• New York Times v. Sullivan (1964): public officials must prove actual malice, because debate on public issues needs "breathing space."
• Gertz v. Robert Welch (1974): private people need not prove actual malice. States may set the standard, usually negligence, but may not impose liability without fault.
• Milkovich v. Lorain Journal (1990): calling something opinion does not protect a false factual implication. Pure opinion and obvious hyperbole are protected.
• Truth, fair reports of official records and pure opinion protect you. Repeating someone else's accusation, or adding "allegedly," does not.

Sources

1. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). Legal Information Institute.
2. Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974). Legal Information Institute.
3. Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990). Legal Information Institute.
4. Digital Media Law Project. (n.d.). Defamation; Proving fault: Actual malice and negligence; Opinion and fair comment privileges. Defamation; Proving fault; Opinion.
5. Student Press Law Center. (2015, October 21). Libel and privacy FAQs. SPLC.
6. Hiestand, M. (2018, November 6). A dozen tips to avoid being burned by a hot story. Student Press Law Center. SPLC.

Two drafts on the editor's desk

On a Monday in March, two drafts reach the editor of the Lakeview Ledger. Both were written for this course, and the people in them are invented. Neither says anything false about anyone, so neither is libel. Both still have legal problems.

Draft A is a news story about a fight in the cafeteria. It includes:

1. a phone video of the fight, shot by a student bystander and sent to the paper;
2. the names of the two students suspended, which the reporter learned from a student office aide who read the discipline log;
3. quotes from a phone interview with a witness, recorded without telling her;
4. a photo of one student's bruised face, copied from his public Instagram account;
5. the number of fights reported this year, from a district report presented at a public school board meeting.

Draft B is a review of a new animated film. It includes:

1. the film's official poster, downloaded from the studio's press site;
2. three paragraphs copied from a city newspaper's review, with credit;
3. a 20-second clip of the film, recorded on a phone in the theater;
4. a photo of the film's director, found through an image search;
5. two short lines of dialogue quoted in the review.

So what? A story can be completely true and still invade someone's privacy, break a recording law or copy someone else's work illegally. This lesson gives you a five-step check to run before you publish, then runs it on both drafts. Like every lesson in this module, it is general information, not legal advice.

Step 1: Privacy

Privacy law has grown over the last century, mostly in the states. The Student Press Law Center describes four kinds of privacy claims. Each one can arise even when every word is true.

The main defense to a private-facts claim is newsworthiness. According to the SPLC, almost any information about a public official or a well-known public figure counts as newsworthy, and so does anyone's recent involvement in a crime. In Smith v. Daily Mail (1979), which you read in Lesson 15, the Supreme Court protected publishing a juvenile suspect's name that was lawfully obtained and truthfully reported.

Consent is a defense to all four claims. The SPLC advises getting consent from someone with the legal right to give it and being candid about how you will use the material. Consent in writing is easiest to prove. Can a minor consent? The SPLC's view is that most high school students probably can, if they understand what they are agreeing to, while most elementary-age children probably cannot. It also says no federal or state law requires parental consent to interview or photograph a minor. The exception it names is New Jersey and Maine, which require a parent's approval for a student to be pictured or named on a school-operated website.

This course's own rule is stricter than the law: get permission before photographing or recording anyone, especially other minors, and follow your school's rules.

Step 2: Recording

Lesson 4 covered the basic rule. Federal law and most states let you record a conversation you are part of with only your own consent. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press counts about 11 states that primarily require everyone in the conversation to agree. Three more points matter for student reporters.

• Calls across state lines. The Reporters Committee advises assuming the stricter state's law applies. So treat a call from a one-party state to a source in an all-party state as needing everyone's consent.
• Video and sound. Wiretap laws cover sound. If your camera records no audio, they generally do not apply. Separately, every state has laws against certain uses of hidden cameras in private places.
• Officials in public. The Reporters Committee reports that six federal appeals courts have recognized a First Amendment right to record government officials doing their jobs in public, such as police at a traffic stop, as long as you do not interfere. The Supreme Court has not decided the question.

At school, school rules on recording apply too. This course's rule is simple: ask before you record, and get the yes on the recording.

Step 3: FERPA and student records

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, is a federal law. The U.S. Department of Education explains that it gives parents rights over their children's education records: to see them, to ask for corrections and to have some control over who else sees them. Those rights pass to the student at 18 or on entering college. FERPA governs what schools and their employees release. As the SPLC explains, it does not govern what student journalists publish.

Schools may release basic directory information, such as names and photos, unless a family opts out in writing. The SPLC says no court has decided whether student media must honor those opt-outs, but many do so as a courtesy.

That has practical effects. The school may refuse to give you records about individual students, and it should. Do not ask anyone to break the rules for you, including a student who works in the office. The SPLC notes that journalists who did nothing unlawful to get newsworthy information, and did not encourage or help anyone else to, are generally protected in publishing it. That protection depends on your hands staying clean. A record that does reach you still raises the private-facts questions in Step 1 and the ethics questions in Lesson 15.

Step 4: Copyright: whose work is it?

Copyright protects "original works of authorship" fixed in a tangible form: writing, photos, music, video, drawings and software. According to the U.S. Copyright Office, protection exists automatically from the moment a work is fixed. Registration is not required for a copyright to exist, and a copyright notice has not been required since March 1, 1989. So assume that any photo, article, song or video you find online belongs to someone.

Some things are free for everyone to use.

• Facts and ideas. Copyright protects expression, not facts. "No author may copyright his ideas or the facts he narrates," the Supreme Court said in 1985. You can report what another story found, in your own words, with credit for the reporting.
• Titles, names, short phrases and slogans, which the Copyright Office lists as not protected.
• Works of the U.S. government. Federal law says copyright protection "is not available for any work of the United States Government," such as a federal agency's report. That rule covers the federal government only.
• Old works. In the United States, works published before 1931 are in the public domain, according to a widely used chart from Cornell University's library, updated January 1, 2026.

For works created since 1978, copyright generally lasts for the author's life plus 70 years. Anything else needs permission, a license or a fair use argument.

Step 5: Fair use and Creative Commons

Copyright has a built-in exception. Section 107 of the Copyright Act says the fair use of a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." Courts weigh four factors listed in the law. The table explains them the way the Copyright Office does.

No number settles it. The Copyright Office says there are "no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work."

A news case shows the factors at work. In March 1979, an undisclosed source gave The Nation magazine the unpublished manuscript of former President Gerald Ford's memoir. Time magazine had agreed to pay $25,000 for the right to print 7,500 words from Ford's account of his pardon of Richard Nixon before the book came out. Working from what the Court called the "purloined" manuscript, The Nation published a 2,250-word article. At least 300 to 400 words of it were quoted word for word, and it was timed to "scoop" Time. Time canceled its article and refused to pay the remaining $12,500.

On May 20, 1985, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, the Supreme Court held that this was not fair use. The quotes were a small part of the book, but the trial court had found that the magazine "took what was essentially the heart of the book." The work was unpublished, and the copying cost its owners a sale. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "In our haste to disseminate news, it should not be forgotten that the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression."

Bottom line: News reporting is a purpose that can support fair use, not a free pass. Quote only what your point needs, add your own reporting or commentary, and never publish something that could replace the original.

Creative Commons licenses offer another route. A creator who uses one gives permission in advance, on stated conditions. The licenses combine four elements: BY (give credit), SA (share adaptations under the same terms), NC (noncommercial use only) and ND (no changes). There are six licenses, from CC BY, the most open, to CC BY-NC-ND, the most limited. A separate tool, CC0, lets creators give up their rights as fully as the law allows. Creative Commons recommends crediting a licensed work with its Title, Author, Source and License, which it shortens to TASL.

Running the check on both drafts

Neither draft should run as written. Both can run after an hour of fixes.

Common misconceptions

• If it is online, it is free to use. Copyright is automatic, and no notice is required.
• Giving credit makes copying legal. Credit is good practice, but it is not permission. Unless the use is fair, the work is in the public domain or a license allows it, only the owner can authorize a copy.
• Using less than 10 percent, or under 30 seconds, is always fair use. The Copyright Office says no fixed amount is automatically allowed.
• FERPA stops student journalists from publishing students' names. FERPA governs what schools release, not what student media publish.
• A minor cannot legally agree to an interview without a parent. The SPLC says no law requires parental consent, with a narrow exception for school-operated websites in two states. This course still asks for permission and a trusted adult who knows.
• If every fact is true, you cannot be sued. A private-facts claim is built on true information.

Pulling it together

• Privacy law recognizes four claims: private facts, false light, intrusion and misappropriation. Newsworthiness and consent are the main defenses.
• Most states require one party's consent to record, about 11 require everyone's, and across state lines you should assume the stricter law. Ask on the recording.
• FERPA binds schools, not student media. Never solicit a student's records.
• Copyright is automatic. Facts, ideas, U.S. government works and works published before 1931 are free to use; everything else needs permission, a license or fair use.
• Fair use weighs four factors, and news reporting helps but is not a pass, as Harper & Row shows.
• Creative Commons licenses give permission in advance; credit with TASL.

Sources

1. Student Press Law Center. (2011, June 1). Invasion of privacy law, in brief. SPLC.
2. Student Press Law Center. (2015, October 21). Libel and privacy FAQs. SPLC.
3. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. (n.d.). Introduction to the Reporter's Recording Guide. RCFP.
4. U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). What is FERPA? Protecting Student Privacy. studentprivacy.ed.gov.
5. U.S. Copyright Office. (2021). Copyright basics (Circular 1); and U.S. Copyright Office fair use index. Circular 1 (PDF); Fair use; FAQ.
6. 17 U.S.C. 105 and 107; 18 U.S.C. 2319B. Section 107; Section 105; Section 2319B.
7. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985). Legal Information Institute.
8. Hirtle, P. B. (2026). Copyright term and the public domain in the United States. Cornell University Library. Cornell.
9. Creative Commons. (n.d.). CC licenses and Recommended practices for attribution. Licenses; Attribution.

A ravine full of cannonballs, 1855

On April 23, 1855, during the Crimean War, the British photographer Roger Fenton borrowed a couple of mules to haul his darkroom wagon into a ravine near Sevastopol. It was known as the valley of the shadow of death, for the Russian cannonballs that had fallen there. He wrote to his wife the next day that he had "got 2 good pictures." Both were made from the same spot. In one, cannonballs lie in the ditch beside the road. In the other, they are scattered across the road itself. You can see the pair at the Public Domain Review, linked in the Sources. This lesson describes famous photographs and links to them rather than reproducing them.

Which came first? If the road was clear first, someone moved the cannonballs onto it for the second picture. In 2007 the filmmaker Errol Morris investigated the question in a three-part series for the New York Times, and even traveled to the Crimea. The answer came from small rocks on the hillside. In the picture with cannonballs on the road, a group of rocks sits lower on the slope, as if kicked loose by someone walking there. Rocks roll down, not up. So the clear-road picture came first, and the cannonballs were very likely moved onto the road for the second.

Even then, Morris warned against jumping to conclusions about motive. A claim that a photo was posed is a claim that the photographer meant to deceive, he wrote, and trickery should be "the last explanation I consider, not the first I jump to." We know what changed in the scene. We cannot know what Fenton intended.

Worth holding on to: A photograph records light, not intent. An editor's questions are about the scene and the record: was anything moved, added or removed, and does the caption tell readers what happened?

A mother in a pea pickers' camp, 1936

In March 1936, Dorothea Lange was finishing a month photographing migrant farm workers across California for a federal agency, the Resettlement Administration. At a pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, she photographed a mother and her children in a makeshift tent. In a 1960 magazine account, Lange recalled that the family had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields and birds the children killed, and that the mother had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. Lange also wrote, "I did not ask her name or her history."

The best-known frame, now called Migrant Mother, shows the woman with her hand raised to her face, an infant in her lap and two children leaning on her shoulders, their faces turned away from the camera. She was identified in 1978, through the work of a reporter for the Modesto Bee, as Florence Owens Thompson. The Library of Congress, which holds Lange's negatives, also keeps an early print that shows something the famous version does not: a thumb in the lower right foreground. The negative itself was retouched to remove it.

Was that manipulation? The NPPA Code of Ethics, the main code for visual journalists, says not to manipulate images "in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects." Removing a thumb changes little about what the picture says. Many newsrooms take a stricter line anyway. The Baltimore Sun stated its policy in 2003: "no alteration of content is acceptable." The harder question in this story is consent. Thompson did not choose to become a symbol, and Lange did not ask her name.

A flag on Mount Suribachi, 1945

On February 23, 1945, the fifth day of the battle for Iwo Jima, Marines raised a small flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi, and a Marine photographer, Louis Lowery, photographed it. Later a larger flag was sent up to replace it. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who stood 5-foot-4, climbed onto a pile of sandbags and rocks for a better angle. As six men raised the second flag, he pressed the shutter, not knowing whether he had a usable picture. A print is in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, linked in the Sources.

The photo ran on front pages two days later and won the Pulitzer Prize that spring. Then came the charge that it was staged. Back on Guam, someone asked Rosenthal whether his picture was posed. He thought the question was about a different shot, a group of cheering Marines under the flag that he really had posed afterward, and he said "Sure." A Time and Life correspondent cabled that the famous photo was staged, and Time repeated the charge on its radio show. It retracted the claim almost immediately and apologized, but the story never fully died. The Nelson-Atkins label puts it plainly: "this image was not staged."

The record had a different flaw: the names. In 2016 the Marine Corps concluded that a man long identified as Navy corpsman John Bradley was actually Pfc. Harold Schultz. In 2019, after a two-year investigation with help from the FBI and private historians, it concluded that a Marine long identified as Rene Gagnon was Cpl. Harold Keller. The photograph was true. Part of its caption was wrong for more than 70 years.

A road outside Trang Bang, 1972

On June 8, 1972, a South Vietnamese plane dropped napalm on the village of Trang Bang in what the AP calls a "friendly fire" attack. Children ran down the road toward waiting journalists. At the center of the famous frame is 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who had torn off her burning clothes. The AP credited the photo to a young Vietnamese staff photographer, Huynh Cong Ut, known as Nick Ut.

Publishing it was itself an editing decision. According to the AP's own account, the photo editor on duty in Saigon believed the girl's nudity would make the picture unacceptable in the United States. The bureau's photo chief, Horst Faas, overruled him, and editors in New York agreed the image should go out because of its honest depiction of the horror of war. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was named World Press Photo of the Year in the 1973 contest.

In early 2025 a documentary called The Stringer, made by the VII Foundation, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. It argued that the photo was taken by a Vietnamese freelancer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, and wrongly credited. Nghe told the AP in writing that he stood on the road and shot his whole roll as the children ran out. Kim Phuc, in a statement to the AP, said eyewitnesses have confirmed "that it was Nick Ut who was there."

The AP investigated for almost a year. It studied every photo of that day in its archive, inspected more than a dozen cameras and built a 3D model of the road. In May 2025 it concluded that "it is possible Nick Ut took the photo," but that this "cannot be proven definitively." Its standards remove a credit only on definitive evidence, so the credit stayed. On May 16, 2025, World Press Photo reached a different judgment. It suspended its attribution to Ut, saying two other photographers "may have been better positioned to take the photograph." Both organizations agree the photograph itself is authentic. A credit line is a factual claim, and two careful organizations weighed the same evidence and decided differently.

A soldier near Basra, 2003

In late March 2003, early in the Iraq war, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page photo by its staff photographer Brian Walski, and other papers ran it too. It showed a British soldier gesturing to Iraqi civilians near Basra. A staffer at the Hartford Courant noticed that some people in the background appeared twice. Walski admitted that he had combined two photos, taken seconds apart, into a single image with a better composition. The Times fired him. The Baltimore Sun, which had also run the picture, told readers that it "regrets having published a falsified photograph." The Museum of Hoaxes, linked in the Sources, shows the published composite next to the two originals.

Five photographs, one code

Three words get confused. Staging means arranging a scene, or asking people to act, and then presenting it as something that just happened. Posing a portrait is honest when readers can tell it is a portrait. Altering means changing the picture after it is taken, by retouching or by combining frames. A photo illustration, built on purpose to make a point, is acceptable only when it is clearly labeled. The Baltimore Sun's 2003 policy also says such illustrations "are not used with news stories."

Common misconceptions

• A photograph cannot lie. Scenes can be arranged before the shutter opens, and images can be changed afterward. The Fenton pair and the Walski composite show both.
• If a photo was posed, the event was fake. Rosenthal posed a group shot after recording a real moment. The two pictures were different, and confusing them created a myth.
• A famous photo's caption must be right. The Iwo Jima flag raisers were misidentified for decades, and the credit for the Trang Bang photo is now disputed.
• Small edits never matter. Many newsrooms forbid removing anything at all, because readers cannot tell which changes were small.
• Disputes over credit are about the photo being fake. No one disputes that the Trang Bang photo shows a real moment. The question is who took it.

The takeaway

• Fenton's two exposures show that a scene can be changed before the shutter opens, though a photo cannot show intent.
• Lange's Migrant Mother was retouched and its subject was never asked her name: editing and consent are both ethical questions.
• Rosenthal's flag raising was real; a misunderstanding about a different, posed picture made people doubt it, and the names in its caption were partly wrong.
• The Trang Bang photo is authentic, but its credit is disputed; the AP kept it and World Press Photo suspended it in 2025.
• Walski combined two frames and was fired; the NPPA code forbids manipulation that misleads viewers.
• Label posed portraits and photo illustrations clearly, and treat every caption and credit as a fact to verify.

Sources

1. Morris, E. (2007, September 25 and October 23). Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Parts one and three). The New York Times, Opinionator. Part one; Part three.
2. The Public Domain Review. (n.d.). Of chickens, eggs, and cannonballs: Roger Fenton's Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855). Public Domain Review.
3. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. (2019). Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photographs in the Farm Security Administration collection (research guide, including Lange's 1960 account and the unretouched print).
4. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Migrant Mother. Wikipedia.
5. Lancaster, M. (2023, September). Was the flag-raising on Iwo Jima posed? American Heritage. American Heritage.
6. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. (n.d.). Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. Nelson-Atkins.
7. Athey, P. (2019, October 17). Another Marine was misidentified in iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, Corps says. Military Times. Military Times.
8. Associated Press. (2025, May 6). AP report update: Investigating claims around 'The Terror of War' photograph. AP; report (PDF).
9. World Press Photo. (2025, May 16). Authorship attribution suspended for 'The Terror of War'. World Press Photo.
10. Editor's note. (2003, April 3). The Baltimore Sun. Baltimore Sun.
11. Boese, A. (n.d.). British soldier in Basra. The Museum of Hoaxes. hoaxes.org.
12. National Press Photographers Association. (n.d.). NPPA Code of Ethics. NPPA.

Fifty minutes before the first bus

At 6:10 on a Tuesday morning, a photographer for the Lakeview Ledger stands in the doorway of the cafeteria kitchen with her phone. The cafeteria manager, Marisol Vega, has agreed to let her photograph the breakfast crew on two conditions: stay clear of the ovens, and ask before photographing any student's face. The first bus arrives at 7:00. The scene and the people are invented for this course, but every step she takes is one you can take for your own photo story in Reporting assignment 8.

The core of it: A news photo is a piece of reporting. It has to be true to what happened, fair to the people in it and clear enough that readers understand what they are seeing.

Step 1: Plan the story and get permission

Before she lifts the camera, the photographer writes her story in one sentence: Four cooks make breakfast for about 400 students before the first bell. A photo story, also called a photo essay, needs that focus. The yearbook publisher Friesens, in its guide for student staffs, suggests two structures. A time-based story runs beginning, middle and end, which suits events. A space-based story moves from wide to medium to tight to detail, which suits places and routines. Her story is a routine, so she plans wide, medium, tight and detail shots, plus a portrait of Vega and a final picture to close the story.

Permission comes next, at three levels.

• The place. Ask whoever is responsible for it, and follow your school's rules on photography and recording. Vega's kitchen is a workplace, and her conditions are part of the deal.
• The people. Ask before you photograph someone, especially another minor. This course's rule is stricter than the law. The SPLC notes that people in places open to public view generally cannot expect privacy there, but a school building still has school rules.
• The school's list. Families can opt out of the school releasing directory information, such as names and photos. The SPLC says no court has decided whether student media must honor those opt-outs, but many do as a courtesy. Ask your adviser whether your school keeps such a list.

Then she writes a shot list. Friesens suggests listing one person, two people, a small group, a large group, wide shots, close-ups and details, along with action verbs such as "cheering" or "setting up." Hers reads: griddle, trays, hands, the count sheet, laughing, waiting, doors opening. A list is a plan, not a script. The best moment is often one she did not expect.

Step 2: Read the light

A photograph is recorded light, so she looks at the light before anything else and asks where it comes from.

• Side light, such as a window to one side, shapes faces and shows texture. The kitchen has a window by the prep table, so she plans her close-ups there.
• Overhead light, like rows of ceiling fixtures, is even but flat, and it can leave dark shadows under eyes.
• Backlight, with the bright source behind the subject, turns faces into dark shapes. On most phones you can tap the face on the screen to set focus and brightness for it. Or move, so that the light falls on the face.

Step 3: Compose the frame

Composition is where things sit in the picture. Four habits help most.

• The rule of thirds. Imagine the frame divided into nine equal parts by two horizontal and two vertical lines. Place the important element on a line or where two lines meet, rather than dead center. The idea is old: the English artist John Thomas Smith wrote down the phrase "rule of thirds" in 1797. Treat it as a starting point, not a law.
• Get closer. Fill the frame with what matters. On most phones, zooming beyond the built-in lenses just enlarges part of the image and loses detail, so walk closer instead.
• Check the edges and the background. A pole growing out of someone's head, or a stranger cut in half at the edge, pulls the eye away from the story.
• Change your angle. Shoot from low and from high, horizontal and vertical. Friesens recommends exactly that variety, because a photo story built from one angle feels flat.

Step 4: Wait for moments and cover the scene

A strong news photo usually holds a moment: an expression, a gesture, an exchange between people. Moments cannot be ordered up, so the photographer waits for them. She watches the cook at the griddle until she learns the rhythm of the job, then shoots a burst of frames as he flips a tray of pancakes. She shoots far more frames than she needs. Friesens' advice to student photographers is simple: be patient, shoot lots and let the story unfold.

She also covers the scene the way a reader needs to see it.

What she does not do is direct the action. The Associated Press says in its news values that it does not stage or re-enact events for the camera. It asks people to pose only for portraits, and then it says so in the caption. If the photographer misses the moment the doors open, she does not ask the students to walk in again. She photographs what happens next.

Step 5: Edit honestly

Back at school, she reviews 312 frames and picks seven. Friesens suggests opening a photo story with its strongest image, the dominant photo, then arranging the rest to guide the viewer through the story, with variety in the shots and unity in the mood.

Then she adjusts the pictures, within limits. The AP's rules make a good guide for any newsroom. They allow minor adjustments: cropping, dodging and burning (lightening and darkening areas), converting to black and white, removing dust, and normal toning and color correction. Those changes must be limited to what is needed for clear and accurate reproduction. Changes that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable, and backgrounds must not be blurred or erased. The NPPA code puts the principle in one line: editing "should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context."

Many phone photo apps now include tools that erase an object with one tap. In a news photo, erasing anything changes what the scene contained. That is the same kind of alteration that ended Brian Walski's job at the Los Angeles Times in 2003, as Lesson 21 showed. Keep every original file, unedited, so an editor can compare.

Step 6: Gather captions at the scene

Lesson 13 covered how to write a caption: who is doing what, where and when, in the present tense, then a sentence of context. The work starts at the scene. For each person she photographs, she writes the full name, checks the spelling, and notes the person's role and the time. When several people share a frame, she writes their names from left to right before anyone walks away. She also notes how each picture was made, so a posed portrait can be labeled as one.

Here is a caption for her dominant photo, written for this course: Cook Darnell Price flips pancakes at 6:42 a.m. Tuesday in the Lakeview High School kitchen. He and three co-workers served 412 breakfasts before the 7:00 bell. And for the portrait: Cafeteria manager Marisol Vega poses at the serving line before breakfast Tuesday. She has run the kitchen for 11 years.

Common misconceptions

• Good news photos need an expensive camera. Light, closeness, timing and honesty matter more, and all of them are available on a phone.
• If you miss the moment, ask people to do it again. That is staging. Photograph what happens next, or make a portrait and label it.
• Any edit that makes a photo look better is fine. Only minor adjustments that keep the picture accurate are acceptable. Erasing, adding or blurring changes the record.
• In a public place you can photograph anyone. The law gives wide room, but school rules and this course's permission rule still apply, especially for minors.
• The caption can wait until later. Names, spellings and left-to-right order have to be gathered at the scene.

Recap

• Write the story in one sentence, pick a time-based or space-based structure, and make a shot list.
• Get permission for the place and the people, and check whether your school keeps a photo opt-out list.
• Read the light, use the rule of thirds as a starting point, walk closer and vary your angles.
• Wait for real moments and cover the scene wide, medium, tight and detail. Never stage or re-enact.
• Edit only within newsroom limits such as the AP's, never erase or add, and keep the originals.
• Gather names and spellings at the scene, left to right, and label posed portraits.

Sources

1. Friesens. (n.d.). Chapter 10: Photo stories. Yearbookology. Friesens.
2. Associated Press. (n.d.). News values and principles: Telling the story (Visuals; Fabrications). AP.
3. National Press Photographers Association. (n.d.). NPPA Code of Ethics. NPPA.
4. Student Press Law Center. (2015, October 21). Libel and privacy FAQs. SPLC.
5. Wikipedia. (n.d.). Rule of thirds. Wikipedia.

Five sentences to check

A data reporter for the Lakeview Ledger has been reading the Census Bureau's newest state population estimates. Her draft opens with five sentences. They were written for this course, but every number in them comes from the real data.

(1) Texas was the fastest-growing state last year, adding 391,243 people. (2) California lost population. (3) Utah has the highest birth rate because it has more babies than other states. (4) The South's share of the U.S. population grew 1 percent from 2020 to 2025. (5) The typical state now has about 6.7 million people.

One of these sentences is right. The other four are wrong, or half wrong, in ways most readers would never notice. This lesson shows you how to check each one yourself, with the same file, in a free spreadsheet. Every calculation is shown so you can follow along.

Open the file

The data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimates, released in January 2026. A vintage is the set of estimates produced in a given year. With each new release, the Bureau revises the whole series back to the last census, so always name the vintage you used. Find the Bureau's page called "State Population Totals and Components of Change: 2020-2025" and download the dataset file NST-EST2025-ALLDATA. It is a CSV file, which stands for comma-separated values, and a file layout document explains every column.

Two free programs will open it. In Google Sheets, which needs a free Google account, choose File, then Import, then Upload. LibreOffice Calc is free and open source software that you install, with no account. In Calc, choose File, then Open, and accept the comma as the separator.

Look before you calculate. Row 1 holds the column names. Row 2 is the United States. Rows 3 to 15 are the four census regions and their nine divisions; the South Region is row 9. Rows 16 to 66 are the 50 states and the District of Columbia in alphabetical order, from Alabama to Wyoming. Row 67 is Puerto Rico, which is not part of the U.S. total. These columns matter here:

Bottom line: Before any math, know what each row and column measures, for what date, and whether it is a count or an estimate. Every number in this file is an estimate.

Percent change: who grew fastest?

Sentence 1 says Texas was the fastest-growing state. Column R confirms that Texas added 391,243 people, more than any other state. But "fastest-growing" usually means the largest percent change, which compares the change to the starting size.

Percent change = (new minus old) divided by old, times 100.

• Texas: (31,709,821 minus 31,318,578) divided by 31,318,578 = 391,243 / 31,318,578 = 0.01249, or 1.25 percent.
• South Carolina: (5,570,274 minus 5,490,316) divided by 5,490,316 = 79,958 / 5,490,316 = 0.01456, or 1.46 percent.

In the spreadsheet, Texas is row 59. In an empty cell in that row, type =(L59-K59)/K59 and format the cell as a percentage. To compare every state, put the formula in a new column for rows 16 through 66, then sort those rows by it. The leaders are South Carolina at 1.46 percent, Idaho at 1.44 percent and North Carolina at 1.32 percent. Texas is fourth, at 1.25 percent. So sentence 1 is half right: Texas added the most people, but three states grew faster.

Sentence 2 is the one that is right, but it needs scale. California went from 39,364,774 to 39,355,309, a change of minus 9,465. Divided by 39,364,774, that is minus 0.024 percent, about two-hundredths of 1 percent. "Lost population" is true; "fell slightly" tells readers how much.

Percentage points: when the numbers are already percents

Sentence 4 is about a share, and a share is already a percentage. Compute it as the region's population divided by the nation's, times 100.

• July 2020: 126,473,371 / 331,578,104 times 100 = 38.143 percent. In the spreadsheet: =G9/G2*100
• July 2025: 133,833,983 / 341,784,857 times 100 = 39.157 percent. In the spreadsheet: =L9/L2*100

The difference, 39.157 minus 38.143, is 1.014. That is a change of about 1 percentage point, the simple difference between two percentages. The percent change in the share is something else: 1.014 divided by 38.143 is 0.0266, an increase of about 2.7 percent. Sentence 4 says "1 percent," which is wrong. It should say the South's share rose about 1 percentage point, to 39.2 percent. Notice that the rounding came at the end. Round in the middle of a calculation, and small errors pile up.

Rates: totals against population

Sentence 3 is half right. Utah does have the highest birth rate in the file. But Utah had 46,948 births, while California had 398,632, about 8.5 times as many. A rate compares a count to the size of the population, so big and small places can be compared fairly.

The Census Bureau's file layout explains its method: take the births for the year, divide by the average of the population at the start and the end of the year, then multiply by 1,000.

• Utah: average population = (3,502,983 + 3,538,904) / 2 = 3,520,943.5. Rate = 46,948 / 3,520,943.5 times 1,000 = 13.3 births per 1,000 residents.
• California: average = (39,364,774 + 39,355,309) / 2 = 39,360,041.5. Rate = 398,632 / 39,360,041.5 times 1,000 = 10.1 per 1,000.

In the spreadsheet, Utah is row 60: =X60/((K60+L60)/2)*1000 gives 13.33, the same as the Bureau's figure in column BT. A rate per capita means per person; a rate per 1,000 is the same idea, scaled so it is easier to read. Deaths work the same way. California had the most deaths, 288,917, but West Virginia had the highest death rate, 14.1 per 1,000, more than twice Utah's 6.2. A map of total births or deaths mostly shows where people live.

Mean or median: what is typical?

Sentence 5 divided the U.S. total by 51, the 50 states plus the District of Columbia: 341,784,857 / 51 = 6,701,664. That is the mean, or average. The median is the middle value when all the values are sorted. With 51 values, the median is the 26th, which is Kentucky, with 4,606,864 people.

The two differ because a few states are enormous: California has 39.4 million people, Texas 31.7 million and Florida 23.5 million. They pull the mean up, and only 17 of the 51 places are above it. Remove California and Texas, and the mean drops by almost 1.2 million, to 5,524,892. The median moves only about 330,000, to 4,273,586. When a few values are extreme, the median describes the typical case better. In the spreadsheet, =AVERAGE(L16:L66) gives the mean and =MEDIAN(L16:L66) the median. Sentence 5 should say the median state has about 4.6 million residents.

The corrected paragraph

Texas added more people than any other state from July 2024 to July 2025, 391,243, according to Census Bureau estimates released in January 2026, though South Carolina, Idaho and North Carolina grew faster in percent terms. California's population fell slightly, by 9,465. Utah had the highest birth rate, 13.3 births per 1,000 residents, while California, the most populous state, had the most births. The South's share of the U.S. population rose about 1 percentage point from 2020 to 2025, to 39.2 percent. The median state has about 4.6 million residents.

Common misconceptions

• The state that added the most people grew fastest. Big states add big numbers. "Fastest" means percent change.
• A rise from 38 percent to 39 percent is a 1 percent increase. It is a rise of 1 percentage point, which is about a 2.6 percent increase.
• More births means a higher birth rate. Totals follow population size. Rates divide by it.
• The average is always the typical value. A few huge values pull the mean away from the middle. Use the median for "typical."
• Population estimates are exact counts. They are estimates, revised with each new vintage. Say which vintage you used.

The short version

• Name the source, the vintage and the dates, and check what each row and column means before you calculate.
• Percent change = (new minus old) / old. In a spreadsheet: =(L59-K59)/K59.
• A percentage point is the difference between two percentages; the percent change of a percentage is a different number.
• Rate per 1,000 = count / population times 1,000. Compare places of different sizes with rates, not totals.
• The median is the middle value and resists extremes; the mean is pulled by them.
• Round at the end, and show your formulas so an editor can check them.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2026, January). State population totals and components of change: 2020-2025 (Vintage 2025), dataset NST-EST2025-ALLDATA. Census Bureau; CSV file.
2. U.S. Census Bureau. (2026, January). File layout: NST-EST2025-ALLDATA. Census Bureau (PDF).
3. Google. (n.d.). MEDIAN. Google Docs Editors Help. Google.
4. The Document Foundation. (n.d.). LibreOffice. LibreOffice.

A chart that says "booming"

The Lakeview Ledger's data reporter has turned the Census Bureau's file into a graphic for Friday's paper. The chart and its headline, described part by part below, were made for this course, but the numbers are real. They are U.S. births in the year ending June 30, 2024, and in the year ending June 30, 2025.

The numbers on the bars are correct. The chart is still wrong, three times over. Debugging it is the fastest way to learn how charts mislead.

Key idea: A chart makes a claim with shapes. Readers judge the shapes before they read the numbers, so the shapes must tell the truth on their own.

Bug 1: the axis does not start at zero

Look at the vertical axis. The vertical axis starts at 3,600,000, not at zero. So the 2024 bar shows only the 8,217 births above that line, and the 2025 bar shows 20,461. The second bar is about 2.5 times as tall as the first. The real increase was 3,620,461 minus 3,608,217, which is 12,244 births. Divided by 3,608,217, that is 0.34 percent, about a third of 1 percent.

A bar's length is its message, so a bar chart must start at zero. The Associated Press's own rules say so: because bar charts compare data points, "the value axis must always start at zero." Line charts are different. The AP allows a line chart's axis to start above zero, because a line shows a trend rather than comparing lengths. But it warns against leaving out time periods, and it asks for even time intervals.

Bug 2: the range was picked

The chart shows two years. The file has five. Here is the whole series, births in each year from July to June: 2021, 3,584,459; 2022, 3,680,380; 2023, 3,648,896; 2024, 3,608,217; 2025, 3,620,461. Births in 2025 were still 59,919 below the 2022 peak.

Choosing a start date that produces the story you want is called cherry-picking. Start the chart at 2024 and births are "booming." Start it at 2022 and they are "falling." Show the whole range you have, or explain why you chose a shorter one.

Bug 3: a count where a rate belongs

"Booming" suggests that people are having more babies. But the population grew too, by 0.52 percent, faster than births grew. So the birth rate fell, from 10.7 births per 1,000 residents in 2024 to 10.6 in 2025, according to the Bureau's own rate column. The count rose a little, and the rate dropped a little. Neither change is a boom.

The fixed chart

The fixed chart starts at zero and shows every year in the file. It says the years run from July to June, gives the rate below the bars and names its source. Its headline now matches what the shapes show: births held nearly steady. In the story, the sentence becomes: U.S. births rose slightly in the year ending June 30, 2025, by 12,244. But the birth rate edged down, to 10.6 per 1,000 residents, because the population grew faster.

Three more ways charts mislead

• An upside-down axis. In 2014, a Reuters graphic of gun deaths in Florida ran its vertical axis with zero at the top and 800 at the bottom. Using Florida Department of Law Enforcement data, it showed 521 gun deaths in 2005, the year the state passed its "Stand Your Ground" law, then 740 in 2006 and 825 in 2007. Because of the flipped axis, the rise looked like a fall. The sociologist Lisa Wade wrote that most people see "a huge fall-off" in deaths, but "that's not what the graph shows." The statistician Kaiser Fung put the lesson simply: there should be a very high bar against breaking a convention readers rely on.
• Pictures that grow in two directions. If a chart shows 2 million as a coin icon and 4 million as a coin twice as tall and twice as wide, the bigger coin covers four times the area. Readers see four times, not two. Use bars, which grow in one direction only.
• Maps of totals. A map shading each state by total births mostly shows where people live: California had 398,632 births, Utah 46,948. Shade by the rate per 1,000, and Utah, at 13.3, stands out.

Data that tested a claim: Ida B. Wells, 1895

Counting can be an act of courage. In the 1890s, mobs in the United States killed hundreds of people without any trial, a crime called lynching. Defenders of the mobs claimed the killings punished one crime above all, rape. The journalist Ida B. Wells tested that claim with numbers in A Red Record, published in 1895.

She chose her data so that no critic could dismiss it. The Chicago Tribune, which she called "one of the leading journals of America," published a yearly tally of lynchings. Wells built her record from compilations "made by white men," as she put it, not from her own reporting. "In order to be safe from the charge of exaggeration," she wrote, "the incidents hereinafter reported have been confined to those vouched for by the Tribune."

Then she sorted the cases by the accusation made against each victim. For 1892 she counted 241 people lynched, 160 of them Black. Of those 160, 46 had been accused of rape. That is 46 divided by 160, about 29 percent. Her conclusion: "not one-third of the victims lynched were charged with rape," and the charges ranged "from murders to misdemeanors." She also set the mob against the law with one comparison: in 1894, 132 people were executed in the United States "by due form of law," while 197 were killed by mobs.

Wells's method still works: use sources your critics cannot reject, put every case into categories, count them, and let the count answer the claim.

Social science on deadline: Philip Meyer, 1967

In 1967, a deadly riot tore through Detroit. A popular belief held that the rioters were the least educated residents. Philip Meyer, then a national correspondent for Knight Newspapers, worked with the Detroit Free Press on a survey of residents of the riot areas and analyzed the answers on an IBM 360 mainframe computer. The results contradicted the belief: people who had attended college were as likely to have rioted as high school dropouts. According to Investigative Reporters and Editors, the work helped earn the Free Press a Pulitzer Prize. Meyer later called the approach "precision journalism," the title of his 1973 book.

Meyer never thought the machine was the point. "The computer is just a tool," he told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2001. One warning he gave was about comparisons. He criticized a Kansas City Star series that compared AIDS deaths among Catholic priests with deaths in the general population, when all priests are men and men had a much higher AIDS death rate. The fairer comparison, priests against other men, appeared only deep in the story. Before you trust a number, ask: compared with what?

From spreadsheet to story

A finding in a spreadsheet is the start of reporting, not the end. To turn the births numbers into a story, a reporter would first check the definitions in the file layout and ask the Census Bureau's press office about anything unclear. Then she would find people who can explain the change: a demographer at a state data center, a hospital that delivers babies, families making decisions about children. Numbers say what changed. People help explain why, and how it feels. Every number in the story should be traceable to its source, and every chart should make no claim the data cannot support.

Common misconceptions

• If the numbers on a chart are correct, the chart is honest. A truncated axis or a picked range can make correct numbers tell a false story.
• Every chart's axis must start at zero. Bar charts must. Line charts may start above zero, as long as they show the full time range at even intervals.
• A rising count means a rising rate. If the population grows faster than the count, the rate falls, as U.S. births showed in 2025.
• Data journalism means using a computer. Ida B. Wells did it with newspaper clippings in 1895. The method is counting carefully and comparing fairly.
• The data speaks for itself. Every dataset has definitions, gaps and choices. Reporters check them and add human sources.

What to carry forward

• Bar charts start at zero; line charts may not, but they must show the whole period at even intervals.
• Show the full range you have, or explain why you chose a shorter one.
• Use rates, not totals, when comparing groups of different sizes, on charts and on maps.
• Watch for flipped axes and pictures that grow in two directions.
• Ida B. Wells chose sources her critics could not reject and let a careful count answer a claim; Philip Meyer brought survey methods into the newsroom and asked "compared with what?"
• Check definitions, name your source and vintage, and add human sources who can explain the numbers.

Sources

1. Associated Press. (n.d.). News values and principles: Telling the story (Charting resolution; Avoid distortion). AP.
2. U.S. Census Bureau. (2026, January). State population totals and components of change: 2020-2025 (Vintage 2025). Census Bureau.
3. Lallanilla, M. (2014, April 23). Misleading gun-death chart draws fire. Live Science. Live Science.
4. Wade, L. (2014, April 21). How to mislead with charts: Stand Your Ground laws and gun deaths in Florida. Pacific Standard. Pacific Standard.
5. Wells-Barnett, I. B. (1895). A red record: Tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynchings in the United States. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg.
6. Sullivan, M. (2001, May/June). Reporting with computers: Speaking with Philip Meyer. Columbia Journalism Review. CJR.
7. Investigative Reporters and Editors. (2023, November 6). IRE legend Meyer dies at 93. IRE.

"Good evening," March 9, 1954

On March 9, 1954, the CBS television program See It Now opened with its host, Edward R. Murrow, speaking to viewers. The half hour, he said, would be a report on Senator Joseph McCarthy "told mainly in his own words and pictures." McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, had won national attention by claiming that Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other institutions. For most of the program, Murrow's staff ran film of McCarthy himself, at hearings and in speeches, and Murrow added short narration between the clips. At the end, Murrow spoke directly to viewers, with lines such as "we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty."

The broadcast is remembered as a turning point. CBS gave McCarthy time to respond, and he did so on See It Now on April 6. Before the year was out, the Senate had censured him. But the program had critics who were no friends of McCarthy. One was John Cogley, a columnist for the magazine Commonweal, who called McCarthy a bully. In March 1954 he faulted Murrow for "illustrating a thesis" with "selected film clips." He warned that the method could "set a bad precedent" in less careful hands.

The point: In broadcast, the sound of a person's own voice is powerful evidence, and choosing which seconds of it to air is an editor's most important decision. That power is why broadcast writing has its own rules.

Print and broadcast, side by side

NPR's training team offers a clear comparison. On February 18, 2015, an Associated Press story about Afghanistan's first cricket World Cup opened with a single sentence of 40 words. It packed a contrast into one line, a loss "but" a victory, and used a phrase no one says out loud: "inclusion among the ranks of elite countries." NPR's Morning Edition aired a similar story, and its host, Steve Inskeep, introduced it in short spoken sentences, including one of three words: "It involves cricket." On paper that would look childish. Out loud, it sounds like a person talking to you.

The reason is simple. A reader can glance back at a sentence; a listener cannot. As Jonathan Kern writes in Sound Reporting, NPR's guide to audio journalism, "time goes in only one direction." The table compares the two crafts.

The Piersall example comes from NPR's guide for print reporters moving to radio. A print obituary lede about the former baseball player put 37 words between his name and the verb "died." Read aloud, that is about 15 seconds of a listener wondering what happened to him. The Journalism Education Association's broadcast guide, written by the teacher Michael Hernandez, sums up the approach: write the way you speak, as if to one person. NPR's guides add the test: read every line aloud, and if you would not say it that way, do not write it that way.

Rewriting a print story for the ear

Lesson 9's print lede read: "The Lakeview school board voted 4-3 Tuesday to end the Friday late bus, which about 140 students ride, starting Jan. 6 to save $86,000 a year." That is 27 words and five facts in one breath. For radio, break it up, put the most important idea first, and round the numbers:

The Friday late bus at Lakeview High is going away. Last night the school board voted four to three to cut it. The district says that saves about 86 thousand dollars a year. About 140 students ride that bus. The cut starts January sixth.

Each sentence carries one idea. The subject sits next to its verb. Numbers are written the way you would say them. Read it aloud: it runs about 50 words, roughly 20 seconds.

The radio script

NPR's guide to radio scripts lists the parts every script shares. The intro is what the host reads to lead into the story. Tracks are the reporter's own narration. Actualities, or acts, are recordings of other people speaking. Ambience, also called ambi or natural sound, is everything else: a bus engine, a hallway, a crowd. Each act gets its length in seconds, and production notes such as "fade under" tell the person mixing the story what to do. Here is the late bus story as a short script with two acts, written for this course:

HOST INTRO: Starting in January, the Friday late bus at Lakeview High
won't run. The school board voted four to three last night to cut it.
The Ledger's Jordan Lee reports.

AMBI: bus engine idling outside school (:03, fade under)

TRACK 1: About 140 students ride this bus on Fridays. Most stay late
for clubs, sports or tutoring. Senior Jalen Brooks is one of them.

ACT 1 (BROOKS) (:03)
"Friday is the day I can't get a ride."

TRACK 2: Board President David Kim says the district faces a budget
gap of one point four million dollars next year.

ACT 2 (KIM) (:03)
"Every option on our list hurts somebody."

TRACK 3: The district says it will post public bus routes near the
school before the cut starts January sixth. For the Ledger, I'm
Jordan Lee.

The tag at the end tells listeners what happens next and who reported the story.

The two-column TV script

Television adds pictures, so its scripts split into columns. In the common two-column format, the left column holds video instructions: camera shots, graphics and roll-ins of recorded video. The right column holds everything the audience hears, with the anchor's words in capital letters for the teleprompter. A textbook from City College of San Francisco defines the shorthand:

• RDR, a reader: a short story read by the anchor, 15 to 20 seconds at most.
• VO, voice-over: the anchor talking over video.
• SOT, sound on tape: a recorded sound bite.
• VO/SOT: the two combined, voice-over and then a sound bite.

Here is the late bus story as a VO/SOT, written for this course.

Timing and pronouncers

Broadcast runs on the clock. NPR's newscast guide says its reporter spots run about 40 seconds, because the newscasts themselves last five minutes at the top of the hour and three at the bottom. Its shorter version, a Q, runs 20 to 30 seconds. To time a script, read it aloud at your normal pace with a stopwatch. As a rough guide from NPR's Piersall example, 37 words take about 15 seconds, so 75 words fill about 30.

A pronouncer tells the reader how to say a name: spell it out by sound and put the stressed syllable in capitals. NPR's sample script included one for its own reporter, Ailsa Chang: [EL-suh]. Hernandez's JEA guide points out that even common-looking names can surprise you; the NPR host Michele Norris says her first name MEE-shell. Never guess. Ask each person how to say the name, write the pronouncer in your script, and record them saying it if you can.

Common misconceptions

• Broadcast writing is print writing read aloud. Sentences, attribution, numbers and word choice all change when the audience can hear a sentence only once.
• Short sentences sound childish. On the page, perhaps. Out loud, they sound like a person talking, and listeners can follow them.
• Repeating a word is bad style. On air, repeating a key word helps listeners keep track.
• Using someone's own recorded words is automatically fair. Which clips you choose, and in what order, can shape the story as much as anything you write.
• You can guess at a pronunciation. Mispronouncing a name tells listeners you did not check. Ask, and write a pronouncer.

Putting it together

• Listeners hear each sentence once, so write short sentences with one idea, keep subjects near verbs and put attribution first.
• Use the words you would say aloud, round and space out numbers, and repeat key words when it helps.
• A radio script has an intro, tracks, actualities, ambience, durations and production notes; a TV script splits video and audio into two columns.
• Time every script aloud: about 75 words fill 30 seconds.
• Write a pronouncer for every name that is not obvious, after asking the person.
• Murrow's 1954 report shows the power of a person's own recorded words, and Cogley's critique shows the responsibility that comes with choosing them.

Sources

1. Bill of Rights Institute. (2020). Edward R. Murrow: Handout D and Handout I: Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, March 9, 1954. Handout D; Handout I.
2. Commonweal. (2005, November 14). Fair and balanced? (an editorial recalling John Cogley's column "The Murrow Show," Commonweal, March 26, 1954).
3. MacAdam, A. (2015, February 25). 'Would you say it that way?' Tips on writing for your voice. NPR Training. NPR.
4. MacAdam, A. (2015, March 9). What does a radio script look like? NPR Training. NPR.
5. MacAdam, A. (2017, December 6). The journey from print to radio storytelling. NPR Training. NPR.
6. Rushlow, K. (2020, March 13). The haiku of radio journalism: How to write a newscast spot. NPR Training. NPR.
7. Hernandez, M. (2012, February 28). Writing for broadcast: How to sound like a real person. Journalism Education Association. JEA.
8. Vaughn, J. (n.d.). 3.3: Multi-column scripts. In Video Production Handbook I. LibreTexts. LibreTexts.

One afternoon, one story

The Lakeview Ledger is starting a weekly news podcast, and reporter Jordan Lee has one afternoon to turn an interview into a 75-second radio story about the library's Saturday hours. The people and the school are invented for this course; the tools and the steps are real. Jordan will use a USB microphone, a pair of headphones and Audacity, a free audio program. Follow the steps and you can make the same kind of story for Reporting assignment 10.

Remember: Listeners cannot see your edits. Everything they hear has to be true to what was said and what happened, so every cut is an editorial decision, not just a technical one.

Step 1: Get the tools

Audacity is free and open source, and it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux computers. It has no phone version. Its makers offer an optional cloud service that requires linking an audio.com account. You do not need an account to record, to save a project on your own computer or to export finished audio. Audacity's help pages are published under a Creative Commons license, and they cover every step below.

You also need a microphone and headphones. A USB microphone plugs straight into the computer. Audacity's guide notes that a laptop's built-in microphone may record a voice well enough, but other recordings from it are often unpleasant to hear. Headphones let you hear what the microphone hears while you record.

Step 2: Set up and check your levels

1. Pick a quiet room. Soft things such as curtains, carpet and couches soak up echo. Turn off fans and close the door.
2. Select the microphone in Audacity's recording device settings. Audacity's guide says most microphones record in mono, and mono is usually the best choice for voice.
3. Make a test recording and listen back with headphones.
4. Check the level. If the meter goes into the red, or the waveform looks like a flat-topped block, you are recording too loud. That distortion is called clipping, and it is hard to repair afterward. If the meter barely moves, you are too quiet. Audacity's guide says the ideal range for normal speech is about minus 18 to minus 12 on its decibel meter. Move the microphone or adjust its volume until you land there.

Step 3: Record room tone

Before the interview starts, ask everyone to stay silent and record about 30 seconds of the room's own sound: the hum of the lights, the air system. This is called room tone. It has two uses. If you need to fill a gap in an edit, a little room tone sounds natural where pure silence sounds like a hole. And Audacity's Noise Reduction effect needs a stretch of audio containing only the noise you want to reduce, which it calls a noise profile. The manual says a longer profile is better.

Noise Reduction has limits. The Audacity manual says it can reduce constant sounds such as hum, hiss or fan noise, but it is not suitable for irregular noise such as traffic or an audience. The cheapest fix for noise is a quiet room.

Step 4: Record the interview

1. Get permission on the recording. Start by saying who you are, the date, and that you are recording for the Ledger's podcast. Ask, "Is it OK if I record this?" and record the answer. Lesson 4 covered recording laws; this course's rule is to ask every time.
2. Slate the recording. Ask the person to say and spell their name and give their title or grade. You now have the spelling and the pronunciation on tape.
3. Keep the microphone close and steady, at the same distance for every answer, and do not talk over the speaker. Let pauses happen; people often say the best thing after a silence.
4. Record your own narration separately, from your script, after the interview. Read each track several times and keep the most natural take.

Jordan interviews librarian Teresa Okafor and junior Nora Salinas, who studies calculus with friends in the library every Saturday. Both agree, on tape, to be recorded.

Step 5: Edit

First, listen to the whole interview and write a log: the time of each answer and the best few seconds in it. Then edit in Audacity. Its guide explains the basic moves. Drag across the waveform to select a section and press Delete to remove it. Split a recording into separate clips, then drag clips to arrange them. Trim a clip's ends, and zoom in to place a cut between words rather than in the middle of one.

Editing changes what listeners hear, so it has rules. NPR's ethics guidance says any editing of an interview must be "true to the meaning of their words." A 2019 NPR training article explains what that means in practice:

• Cleaning up, removing ums, ahs and stumbles, is usually fine, unless it hides that the person was reluctant or unable to answer.
• Internal edits, cutting a digression inside an answer, are acceptable if the essential context remains and the meaning does not change.
• Rearranging questions is acceptable on the same condition.
• Leave in pauses that carry meaning. Sometimes a silence says more than the words around it.

The same article quotes NPR's ethics guidance with a test anyone can use: "No one we interview should be surprised by what they hear or read themselves saying." The Associated Press adds a rule for sound itself: it does not stage events for the microphone, use sound effects, or substitute audio from one event in another. In Jordan's story, the library's ambience must come from the library on a Saturday, not from a recording of some other room.

Step 6: Mix and export

Arrange the tracks and actualities in script order, with a short fade where ambience starts or ends. Listen with headphones and then on a phone speaker. If one voice is much quieter than another, raise it with Audacity's Amplify effect, without pushing it into clipping. Time the whole piece against your target.

Save the project to your computer, not to a USB stick; Audacity warns that it needs fast, uninterrupted access to storage while you work. Then use File, then Export Audio. Keep a full-quality WAV file as your archive, and export an MP3 to publish, because MP3 files are much smaller. Audacity's guide notes that mono is fine for voice, and that some formats require installing a free add-on called FFmpeg.

Music: the rights come first

Music is tempting and legally tricky. The U.S. Copyright Office explains that a musical composition and a sound recording of it are two separate works for copyright purposes. A popular song usually has at least two owners: whoever controls the song itself and whoever controls the recording. Playing a hit under your voice is not commentary on that song, so it is hard to argue that it is fair use.

Safer choices: music you or a classmate made; music your school has licensed; or tracks under a Creative Commons license whose terms fit your use. Read the license on each track before you use it. An ND license forbids adaptations, an NC license limits you to noncommercial use, and every Creative Commons license requires credit. Many good news stories use no music at all.

Common misconceptions

• Podcast software costs money or needs an account. Audacity is free, and recording, saving locally and exporting need no account.
• Noise can always be removed later. Constant hum can be reduced; traffic, crowds and echo mostly cannot. Record in a quiet room.
• Louder is better. Recording into the red causes clipping, which is hard to repair. Aim for about minus 18 to minus 12.
• Any edit is fine if every word was really said. Cuts and rearrangements must stay true to what the person meant.
• Ten seconds of a song is always free to use. No length is automatically fair use, and music has two copyrights.

Where this leaves us

• Audacity is free and open source for Windows, macOS and Linux; you need no account to record, save locally or export.
• Check levels before every recording, avoid clipping, and record 30 seconds of room tone.
• Get permission on the recording, and slate each speaker's name, spelling and title.
• Edit only in ways that stay true to the meaning of what people said; never add sound effects or borrow audio from another event.
• Save the project locally, keep a WAV archive and publish an MP3.
• Use music only when you have the rights, and credit it as the license requires.

Sources

1. Audacity. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions. Audacity.
2. Audacity Support. (n.d.). Recording your voice with a microphone; Editing audio; Saving and exporting projects. Recording; Editing; Saving and exporting.
3. Audacity Manual. (n.d.). Noise Reduction. Audacity Manual.
4. Socolovsky, J. (2019, November 12). How to decide what to cut (or not) in an interview. NPR Training. NPR.
5. Associated Press. (n.d.). News values and principles: Telling the story (Audio and video). AP.
6. U.S. Copyright Office. (2021). Copyright registration of musical compositions and sound recordings (Circular 56A). Copyright Office (PDF).
7. Creative Commons. (n.d.). CC licenses. Creative Commons.

A newspaper that reported its own death

In March 2026, a regional chain called Mid-America Publishing announced that it would close roughly 20 Iowa newspapers within a week, many of them in small towns. One of the first outlets to break the news was the 140-year-old Eagle Grove Eagle, which ran the story of its own coming closure on its front page. That account comes from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, whose State of Local News report for 2026 was released on October 13, 2026.

The Iowa story had a partly happy ending. The Iowa Newspaper Association's new bridge program and quick-moving buyers kept many of the papers alive. Illinois was less lucky. In June, Paddock Publications closed 13 papers there, many in the rural southern tip of the state, leaving a stretch of counties with no local paper at all.

The numbers

Medill defines a news desert as a county with no locally based source of professional local news. Its 2026 figures:

Public attitudes form a puzzle of their own. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,146 U.S. adults in January 2024, 85 percent said local news outlets are at least somewhat important to their community's well-being. Yet only 15 percent had paid for local news in the past year. And 63 percent thought their local outlets were doing very or somewhat well financially. The most common reason people gave for not paying was that plenty of local news is available free.

Why this matters: Local news is how a town learns what its school board, city council and police are doing. When it disappears, someone still makes those decisions. Fewer people know about them.

The dispute: why is it happening?

Researchers and journalists offer two main explanations. They are not mutually exclusive, but they point to different solutions, so it matters which carries more weight.

Explanation one: the business model broke. For most of the 20th century, advertising paid for newspapers. Then cheap internet advertising arrived, and classified ads, store ads and job listings moved online. Pew's analysis puts newspaper advertising revenue at about $49.4 billion in 2005 and $9.8 billion in 2022. That is (9.8 minus 49.4) divided by 49.4, a drop of about 80 percent. Weekday circulation fell from about 53.3 million to 20.9 million over the same years.

Medill's 2026 report calls the collapse of the ad-based model "one of the key drivers" of two decades of losses. Readers have not made up the difference. Only 15 percent pay, by Pew's count. And Medill found that traffic to the largest local newspaper websites fell nearly 50 percent since 2022. It notes that AI tools that summarize the news may be part of the reason.

Explanation two: owners cut too deep. Over the same decades, large chains and investment firms bought hundreds of papers. Medill counts nearly a quarter of all U.S. newspapers, and more than half of all dailies, in the hands of just 10 companies. A 2022 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Michael Ewens, Arpit Gupta and Sabrina Howell looked at papers bought by private equity firms. Under those owners, the number of reporters and editors fell, coverage shifted away from local government, and participation in local elections declined.

The evidence complicates both stories. The same study found that private equity ownership also brought higher digital circulation and a lower chance that a paper would close. A financial owner can keep a paper alive while hollowing it out. And in the past year, Medill found, fewer than 10 percent of newspaper losses came from the 10 largest owners. More than 40 percent came from midsize private chains, and about a third from small independent owners. Some closed after an owner died or a key person left. That pattern fits the first explanation better: small papers with thin margins have no cushion when the economics turn against them.

A third factor runs underneath both: habits are changing. Pew found that the share of Americans who follow local news very closely fell from 37 percent in 2016 to 22 percent in 2024. Many people now get news from social media and content creators. But when Medill examined a sample of about 1,500 creators, fewer than 10 percent covered local issues in their communities.

What communities lose

Researchers have tried to measure the cost. A study by the finance professors Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee and Dermot Murphy, presented at the Brookings Institution in 2018, compared local governments before and after their newspapers closed. Three years after a closure, the interest rates investors demanded on new municipal bonds rose by 5.5 basis points, and more on some kinds of bonds. A basis point is a hundredth of a percentage point. That sounds tiny, but the authors estimate that an extra 10 basis points adds about $650,000 to the cost of an average bond issue, money that comes from taxpayers. Their explanation: with no reporters watching, lenders see more risk.

Other effects reach democracy itself. The private equity study found lower participation in local elections as local government coverage shrank. Medill reports that news deserts tend to be poorer, older, more rural and less educated than the rest of the country. Medill's survey of residents found that 42 percent get news from social media at least daily. Without local reporters, it adds, these communities' stories are less likely to reach the rest of the country.

Common misconceptions

• The internet has replaced local newspapers. Digital-only sites are concentrated in cities; only 9 percent are in rural counties, and more than two newspapers are lost for every startup created.
• Hedge funds alone killed local news. Investor owners cut newsrooms, but most of the past year's closures came from small and midsize owners.
• People don't care about local news. Most say it matters to their community. The problem is that few pay, and many assume their paper is doing fine.
• News deserts exist only in remote places. Medill found that about 70 percent of newspaper losses over 20 years were in urban counties, though recent losses have hit rural areas hardest.
• Social media creators are filling the gap. Few creators cover local issues, and fewer still do original reporting.

What you now know

• A news desert is a county with no locally based source of professional news; Medill counted 238 in 2026, up 26 in a year, with nearly 47 million people in counties with limited or no local news.
• Most Americans value local news, but only 15 percent paid for it in the past year, and most think their outlets are doing well.
• The business-model explanation rests on an advertising collapse of about 80 percent since 2005 and falling readership.
• The ownership explanation rests on evidence that investor owners cut reporters and local government coverage, though they also keep some papers open.
• Recent closures come mostly from small and midsize owners, which fits the business-model explanation better.
• Communities without local news can pay more to borrow and vote less in local elections.

Sources

1. Metzger, Z., and Volk, J. (2026, October 13). The state of local news: The 2026 report. Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University. Medill.
2. Pew Research Center. (2024, May 7). Americans' changing relationship with local news. Pew.
3. Pew Research Center. (2023, November 10). Newspapers fact sheet. Pew.
4. Ewens, M., Gupta, A., and Howell, S. T. (2022). Local journalism under private equity ownership (NBER Working Paper 29743). NBER.
5. Gao, P., Lee, C., and Murphy, D. (2018, September 24). Financing dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on public finance. Brookings Institution. Brookings.

Who will be at the meeting?

At 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, the Lakeview school board takes up the Friday late bus. Thirty-one people have signed up to speak. In the front row sits one reporter, from the student paper. The town's weekly stopped sending anyone to board meetings two years ago. This scene was invented for this course, but Lesson 27 showed how common it has become. This lesson looks at what communities are trying, and then at how you can do the most basic job in local journalism yourself: covering a public meeting.

Five responses, and their critics

Medill's 2026 report argues that no single fix will work and that the response has to come "from several different angles." Here are five, with the evidence for each and the strongest criticism.

In short: Every response helps some places and misses others, and each raises the same question: who pays for local news, and what, if anything, do they expect in return?

Two debates in detail

Federal money for public media. In May 2025, an executive order directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding NPR and PBS. It argued that the media landscape is now "filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options," and that government funding of news is "corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence." In July 2025, Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, which, in NPR's words, "clawed back" $1.1 billion meant for public broadcasting in 2026 and 2027. NPR's chief executive, Katherine Maher, called the vote "an unwarranted dismantling of beloved local civic institutions." She noted that stations in places like West Virginia, and those serving tribal nations, get more than half their budgets from federal funding. Both sides cite real values: independence from government, and service to places the market does not reach.

A tech company paying for news. In August 2024, California and Google announced a deal to put about $250 million over five years into a new fund. The fund is run through the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. The deal shelved a proposed state law that would have made large tech companies pay news outlets. A leader of a publishers' group called it "a start." The Media Guild of the West, a journalists' union, called it an "undemocratic and secretive deal." Some opponents of the original bill argued that it would have helped big chains and hedge-fund owners more than small and community outlets. The disagreement is not only about money. It is about whether help from the companies that took much of local news's advertising makes news outlets stronger or more dependent.

Covering a public meeting, step by step

Whatever happens to the industry, the core work stays the same: someone has to show up, listen, read the documents and tell the community what its government decided. Here is how.

1. Before: find the meeting and read the packet. Government bodies post schedules and agendas, usually days ahead; open meetings laws differ by state, and the Reporters Committee's Open Government Guide explains yours. Download the agenda packet, the staff reports and documents behind each item. Read the minutes of the last meeting. Pick the one or two items that matter most to your readers, and write down your questions.
2. Before: know who is who. List the members, their titles and how they voted on related issues. Ask your editor or adviser what you are covering and when the story is due.
3. During: get there early and take the right notes. Sit where you can see and hear. Note the time beside each item, who said what, every number and date, and the exact vote: who voted yes and who voted no. Count public speakers. Check your state's law and the body's rules before you record or photograph.
4. After: ask, politely. Catch officials and speakers as the meeting ends for a clarifying question and the spelling of their names. Ask for any document someone mentioned. Never block anyone or argue; if someone says no, thank them and leave.
5. Write the news, not the meeting. Lead with the most important decision and what it means for readers, not with the fact that a meeting happened. Then give the vote, the reasons, the other side, the public reaction and what happens next, as in the late bus story from Lesson 9. A lede such as "The Lakeview school board met Tuesday night" tells readers nothing.

If you cannot attend, public records can carry a story too. Minutes, budgets, contracts and inspection reports are public records in most places, and Lesson 3 showed how to ask for them. A story built on records still needs people: the officials responsible, and the residents affected.

Common misconceptions

• One big donor or one new law can save local news. Medill's research points to many responses at once, each with gaps.
• Nonprofit news is free of influence. Every funding model creates pressures; good newsrooms disclose their funders and keep them out of editorial decisions.
• A meeting story should follow the agenda in order. Readers want the decision and its effect first, not the order of business.
• Student journalists cannot cover government. Public meetings are open to the public, and that includes you.
• Covering a meeting means writing down everything. It means preparing, picking what matters and checking every name, number and vote.

Looking back

• Responses to the local news crisis include nonprofits, startups, public media, philanthropy and public policy; each helps some places and leaves gaps, especially in rural areas.
• Public media funding and tech-company deals are live debates, with real values on both sides.
• Covering a meeting starts before it does: the agenda, the packet, the minutes and the people.
• At the meeting, record the exact vote, the numbers and who said what; afterward, ask politely and get the documents.
• Write the news, not the meeting, and add the people the decision affects.

Sources

1. Metzger, Z., and Volk, J. (2026, October 13). The state of local news: The 2026 report. Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University. Medill.
2. Press Forward. (n.d.). About. Press Forward.
3. Executive Order 14290: Ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media. (2025, May 7). Federal Register. Federal Register.
4. Maher, K. (2025, July 18). Unprecedented rescission bill defunds public media (statement). NPR. NPR.
5. Keys, M. (2024, August 22). Google's plan to fund California newsrooms draws scorn from journalism groups. The Desk. The Desk.
6. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. (n.d.). Open Government Guide. RCFP.