Happy trails to Tim McGuire, a great journalist, teacher and friend, heading into retirement

I wonder if I’ve cited anyone in this blog more frequently (or been cited more frequently by anyone in another blog) than Tim McGuire.

Last week Dean Chris Callahan announced Tim’s plan to retire from the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, and I have to cite Tim again: To wish him well and to thank him for his contributions to journalism and journalism education. And especially to thank him for his friendship, advice and contributions to my blog. Update: Tim has written about his retirement on his own blog.

Tim was prominent in journalism when I was still obscure, and I knew of him for years before I actually met him. By the time we became friends, he had moved to the classroom from the newsroom (most notably the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he was editor). Back in my writing coach days, before we had met, I was citing his advice on tight writing in my first blog, Training Tracks, written for newsroom trainers.

Tim and I met in 2007, when I came to the Cronkite School to lead a Newspaper Next workshop for the American Press Institute. (We might have shaken hands earlier at a convention, but this was my first memorable interaction with Tim.)

He blogged about the workshop, with kind words for my presentation and some of the N2 concepts. He criticized API’s marketing, because of the light turnout at the workshop. I responded saying that API had actually probably saturated the newspaper-industry market by the time I reached the Cronkite School. I personally had done an earlier presentation in Arizona, and my colleagues and I had done several dozen more throughout the country, including others in Utah and Las Vegas.

Whether Tim was right or I was about the marketing, our conversation at the workshop and the ensuing exchange on the blog and by email started a friendship that I cherish. And, as with many close friendships, that wasn’t our last disagreement. I think we agree much more about journalism and the news biz than we disagree. But we likely both enjoy the good-natured give-and-take of our disputes more than we do our agreements (as good friends often do).

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Slides and links on mass communication codes of ethics

#ethicssymposium “our sense of right and wrong changes in other parts of life” so why not journo? @stevebuttry asks pic.twitter.com/cPZpe1jzNV

— Phil Tenser (@pstenser) March 14, 2014

I taught a class today in professional codes of ethics for various media careers.

A central point of the class was to discuss whether and why ethics codes should be updated: How much do they present timeless principles and how much should they provide specific guidance relevant to today’s ethical situations and challenges?

I won’t review all the points I made here, but I cited these ethics codes (or principles):

• Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics
• The Institute for Advertising Ethics’ Principles and Practices for Advertising Ethics
• The Accountable Journalism database of journalism ethics codes
• Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics
• Poynter Institute’s Guiding Principles for the Journalist
• Radio Television Digital News Association Code of Ethics
• The Online News Association’s Build Your Own Ethics Code project

I also cited these narrower but more detailed examinations of slices of journalism ethics, all of them completed in the past few years:

• Rules of the Road
• Verification Handbook
• Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting
• Telling the Truth and Nothing But

We discussed native advertising, product placement as efforts to blur the lines between advertising and news or entertainment, including the Cities Energized paid post in the New York Times.

I also cited blog posts by Tom Rosenstiel and Tim McGuire about the relative merits of independence and transparency as core principles of journalism ethics.

I also cited Bob Steele‘s 10 questions to make ethical decisions as advice that is as helpful making ethical decisions today as when he first published them in 2002.

I made points covered in more detail in these earlier blog posts:

• Upholding and updating journalism ethics: My Colorado keynote
• ONA project provides helpful, detailed ethics advice
• Journalists’ code of ethics: time for an update?
• New SPJ Code of Ethics: an improvement but a disappointment
• New Guiding Principles for Journalists a big step forward (but they neglect linking)
• Journalists need to use links to show our work
• Other journalists correct a story the New York Times stubbornly refuses to correct
• Applause to the New York Times for effective use of an on-the-record source
• New York Times story based on unnamed sources: 2 big corrections
• New York Times frequently violates its attribution standards
• Fareed Zakaria’s plagiarism wasn’t ‘low-level;’ no one’s is

These were the slides I used in the class:

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Tracing inspiration instead of counting sheep …

My chemotherapy has included strong doses of oral steroids the last four days, followed by interrupted sleep each night.

I fell asleep about 11 last night, after a couple days of watching, reading and listening to lots of tributes to the late Stuart Scott. I was back awake sometime after 2. Trying unsuccessfully to get to back sleep, flashes of his ESPY speech last night looped through in my memory:

These were the words that echoed in my head, eventually pulling me from the bed and toward the computer:

“When you die, that does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live and in the manner in which you live.”

In a Nov. 25 blog post, when I did not have my official diagnosis yet, but knew my body was filled with lumps that didn’t look good on the first scan, I wrote about different types of plagiarism. Here’s what I wrote about the origins of ideas:

The group that was writing Telling the Truth and Nothing But discussed whether theft of ideas was plagiarism. We decided it wasn’t but stated in the book that you should credit ideas that clearly influence your work:

Journalists should attribute the original, distinctive or seminal ideas of others when the ideas form a substantial basis for their own work.

Some ideas lead directly to other stories: You read a good story from another community and decide if the same thing is happening here and produce a story that’s entirely original in its content, but inspired by someone else. That story might not even have a place to smoothly attribute the idea. But you can include a “related link” to the original story. Perhaps you credit with a “hat tip” in social media or send the reporter an email, thanking her for the inspiration.

Other inspiration is more indirect. You see a story in other media and admire the story. You may think you should do something like that someday, but you don’t start working on your version yet. And when you do start your version, you may or may not remember the source(s) of your inspiration. Or maybe you don’t plan to do your version, but later events on your beat prompt you to do a similar story. You take the same approach, but you may not even remember where you got the idea. You may genuinely think it was your own.

I didn’t watch the ESPYs live last July, but I do think I heard the full Scott clip, and certainly the full speech, over the next few days. I don’t recall clearly thinking about the speech at all when, in November, I was also working on the early drafts of the post where I announced my second cancer diagnosis.

My post included these passages below, an echo/inspiration of Stuart Scott that I freely credit now:

Let’s get one thing straight: If Steve Buttry Cancer 2.0 doesn’t come out the way I’m hoping, I don’t want anyone saying I “lost a battle” with cancer. I kicked cancer’s ass back in 1999 and lived a wonderful 15-plus years since my first diagnosis. If my second round doesn’t end as well, I still won. …

My doctors and I expect me to beat this. But obviously I’m aware of the other possibility. If my death certificate someday lists cancer (whether it’s this lymphoma or something else that becomes 3.0) under “cause,” that’s just a late touchdown to keep me from running up the score.

The rest of the post recounted at some length highlights of the 15 years since my 1999 diagnosis and surgery for colon cancer: how I’ve lived since cancer.

Though I chose my own words and don’t remember any direct inspiration from Scott when I was writing and editing that, the shared themes of beating cancer, but recognizing that you might die from it eventually, are clear. That speech touched me in July, when my latest cancer probably was growing but not yet detected, and some thread of inspiration doubtless remained somewhere in my writer’s memory as I tried to articulate my own new experience.

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Tips for helping the right audience find your book

When I visited my friend Tim McGuire last month, he was awaiting the publication of his memoir and we briefly discussed the challenge he faced in promoting it.

The conversation revived a blog-post idea that had been rattling around on my to-do list for more than two years, since Mimi published her novel, Gathering String, and I helped her promote it. I’m not sure I’m the best person to help Tim with this challenge. While we had some success, I wish we had done a better job on Gathering String. So I’ll share my advice as well as inviting yours: How have you promoted your own books successfully? How would you promote a book, if you had published one? How have publishers succeeded in getting your attention about a book that you later bought and read?

I also asked for advice from some authors I know, and I’ll share tips below from Robert Mann, Doug Worgul, Patricia T. O’Conner and Dan Buttry, as well as some of my own. Novelist Buffy Andrews and author Chuck Offenburger both gave me so much advice I’m breaking their responses out into separate guest posts for tomorrow.

I’m not sure what’s the best path for publishing a book today: self-publishing, as Mimi and Tim did (and keeping a bigger share of the proceeds) or getting a traditional publisher to handle your book (a difficult and not always successful path). Either way, you need to promote the book. An agent, who was willing to handle Mimi’s book but said it might take too long to get published going through traditional publishers, told her that, with rare exceptions, the author is responsible for promotion even when you get a traditional publisher.

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Tim McGuire tells a powerful personal story of disability and acceptance

Journalists don’t tell our own stories often enough.

I practiced the journalism of neutrality and objectivity for most of my reporting and editing career. I became aware that my humanity helped me identify with the people I interviewed and persuade them to tell me important and intimate stories. But the stories were always about someone else.

I learned when Mimi was a columnist (and wrote about our lives frequently, to the readers’ appreciation) and relearned as a blogger that journalists have our own stories to tell, and I believe we should tell them more often.

So here’s my buried lead: Tim McGuire, a longtime editor and now a journalism professor, tells a powerful personal story in his memoir, “Some People Even Take Them Home.” Tim edited a lot of big stories in his career (the Minneapolis Star Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1990, when he was managing editor). But I doubt that he did anything more important than sharing the story of his physical disability (which he denied for years), his son’s mental disability and their “journey for acceptance.”

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Advice for editors from Tim McGuire: Control your calendar and think big

I am pleased that Tim McGuire has offered a contribution to my series on advice for new Digital First editors.

Tim spent 11 years as editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and is now a professor at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Tim has blogged about what he wishes he had done differently as an editor. I encourage you to read his full post, but here’s the core of his advice:

I lost personal control of my calendar and my priorities, and I never thought quite big enough.

I know that in these days of reduced resources many editors are going to scoff at my two pieces of advice but I actually think the tough times make them more important than ever. 1. Don’t waste your time on minor issues and process oriented meetings and, 2. think big, transformative change, not incremental change.

I dearly wish I would have set up a rotating list of five big, direction-changing issues and insisted that my calendar allow me 75 percent availability to concentrate on the five big ideas.

Tim gives excellent advice and I appreciate his contribution to this series.

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This I believe about journalism and the future of media

Thanks to Tim McGuire for his recent “This I believe” blog post, spelling out his core values and views about journalism, newspapers and the future of media. I think it’s helpful, especially in turbulent times, for journalists (or people in any field) to reflect occasionally on what we believe — core values as well as our beliefs about where our profession and our industry are going. I promised earlier this month to blog a response.

This I believe about journalism and the future of media:

I believe journalism plays an essential role in our democracy.

I believe journalism plays an essential role in community life.

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Tim McGuire shares thoughtful beliefs about journalism and the news biz

Tim McGuire did something every journalist should do now and then: Reflected on what he believes about journalism and the news business.

He has kind words for me in the post and mixes praise and criticism for Digital First Media.

It’s one of the most thoughtful pieces you’ll read about journalism and the news business. I plan to blog a longer response at some point. But I have a few things ahead of it, so that might take a week or two. All I want to do now is encourage you to read it and consider what you believe.

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Historic headlines need to look forward

At Tim McGuire’s request, I have done a blog post on a discussion on Twitter the last couple of days about what kind of headline to write about a historic event such as Friday’s resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak:

[View the story “Historic headlines need to look forward” on Storify]

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2011 forecast for journalism organizations: mergers, collaboration, innovation (and some failure)

When the Nieman Lab tweeted yesterday that it had published my journalism predictions for 2011, I couldn’t recall what all I had predicted. I had sent my forecast a couple weeks earlier, in response to a request from Lois Beckett. I remembered predicting a few things off the top of my head, but didn’t immediately recall what I had forecast.

One of the predictions made a stronger impression with some of my tweeps:

We will see some major realignment of journalism and news-industry organizations. Most likely: the merger of ASNE and APME, mergers of some state press associations, mergers of at least two national press organizations, mergers of some reporter-beat associations. One or more journalism organizations will close.

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A message of solidarity from Buttry and Bugeja

By Steve Buttry and Michael Bugeja

We agree more than we disagree about journalism education and its future.

Buttry: Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, and I aired a disagreement this week in comments on this blog and Tim McGuire’s McGuire on Media blog. Frankly, I enjoy a spirited debate and thought this was civil, but after my longtime friend Barb Mack admonished me to use my “inside voice” and Tim (also a friend, though not for as long as Barb) tweeted that a “fight broke out” in his blog comments, I must agree that it was time to dial it down a bit.

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Make Your Story Sing: Learn from songwriters how to tell stories in just a few words

This is the handout for my workshop on short narrative writing. I used to do this workshop quite often, but haven’t done it for a couple years. The handout was originally posted at No Train, No Gain. I am posting some of my NTNG handouts here, with some updating, because NTNG is no longer online.

A common conflict in newspaper newsrooms today is newsholes getting tighter and writers complaining about space limitations on their stories. While space is not limited online, busy digital readers still favor tighter stories. Without question, some stories lose important substance as they get cut for tighter newsholes. But writers should not assume that length restrictions preclude quality narrative writing. Listen to some of your favorite ballads. Study the storytelling of the songwriters. They tell powerful stories in fewer words than the average daily news story. Use those techniques in your stories.

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