Most journalists know the importance of creating a sense of balance in their stories, but it’s not just enough to get quotes from both sides of a particular issue (assuming there are only two sides.) Journalists may be unaware of the bias their stories create based on the involvement and expertise of the sources they choose to quote.

Photo Credit: sskennel, Flickr.

One way to evaluate your coverage’s balance is to sort sources using the following chart:

You should make one chart for the first side of the issue listing your sources names, and one chart for the other side of the issue. Look for disparities between the sides. If you favor one kind of source on one side but not the other, then your story is imbalanced and subject to valid accusations of bias, even if the discrepancy was unintentional or situational.

For some stories this will be more problematic than others, in the eyes of readers. Most people don’t get too riled up over things like the water board or tort reform, but almost everyone has a deeply emotional connection to their stance on abortion rights. And you may be surprised to  find what issues people do get riled up about; transportation and land use issues seem dry and uninteresting, even if they are clearly important to the public. But you can never tell when such issues will inspire passionate activism; even if they don’t, there are usually advocates deeply invested in the outcomes of such issues who rightly demand evenhanded coverage, no matter how niche the issue may be. It’s best to aim for balance as a default.

Let’s use the example of abortion rights, which will crystallize the potential problem a bit.

You’re covering a planned protest outside a local reproductive health clinic. You attend and interview the protesters, staff at the clinic, clinic patrons, counter-protesters, the head of the national abortion rights advocacy organization who did not attend the protest, the pastor of a megachurch in the neighboring county who supported but did not attend the protest, a doctor who supports abortion rights but does not perform abortions, a doctor who opposes abortion rights, and a med student and researcher who provides clinical definitions and explanations.

All of these people could be sorted into various categories above. But what if you quote five different staff at the clinic as well as a clinic patron, but only two protesters? What if the protesters you quote are both new to the movement, but the counter-protesters you quote have been organizing for years? What if you choose not to include scientific arguments made by the doctor who opposes abortion rights, and only included quotes about his or her faith and conscience?

Then you would be (rightfully) accused of producing a story with a pro-abortion-rights, anti-abortion-opposition bias. Which you may not have intended, and perhaps is the opposite of your personal beliefs (which happens when you overcompensate for what you know your bias is.)

This is a much more methodological way of evaluating the bias of a story. Use it when brainstorming source ideas, and when evaluating the finished product.

Since this is the first Weekly Reader post, a few of these will be older ones.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable — Clay Shirky
“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

Nonprofit Newspapers — The New Yorker
In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so.

Milwaukee Journalist Shows How to Investigate Stimulus Job Tally in Your State Journalist finds some jobs counted twice, others counted wrong and some data is misleading.

Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over
“I have been an observer and critic of the American press for 19 years. In that stretch there has never been a time so unsettled. More is up for grabs than has ever been up for grabs since I started my watch.”

Truthiness, Transparency and Other Words I Had Banished Why a fan of the First Amendment risks even the wrath of Stephen Colbert in a quest to get some words eliminated from use.

Jurors Have Difficult Time Giving Up Twitter, Facebook Judges warn against collecting own evidence online.

Tips for Covering Mass Shootings A Salt Lake Tribune reporter provides eight things you need to know.

New Media & Transformation Bibliography List of online resources and books about the history and transformation of new media and online journalism.

Take a Tour of the Book-Writing Process You need the right space and few simple tools.

Goodman: ‘Each One of Us Has Maybe 6 Columns a Year Inside Us’ Ellen Goodman, who retired last week, reflected on the changes she’s seen in journalism since starting out in 1963.

What Great Bosses Know about Doubling Their Feedback Five strategies for time-crunched managers who want to increase the feedback they provide.

Tip Sheets: Writing / Editing Journalism tips you can use, with links to stories, seminars, and a complete bibliography.

Learn About Writing from Poynter Learn About Writing from Poynter

Archived Chat: How to Write a Book Roy Peter Clark shares six secret strategies & answers your questions today at 1 p.m. eastern.

News orgs’ goal for 2010: Imagine tomorrow’s media world today The legacy press — or the traditional media, or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days — has one main challenge for 2010, and it’s not finding a new business model. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.

California Watch: The latest entrant in the dot-org journalism boom

Eric Newton: Shame on us if we don’t take the steps needed to feed knowledge to our democracy

What qualifies as a Spotlight story on Google News? Here’s a few clues

What 2010 will bring newspapers: Bad revenue news, bad bankruptcy news, and maybe a nice tablet

Internships are a great way to apply the skills you’re learning in j-school and combine them with real-world experience. Also, clips! Nothing helps a portfolio like a solid set of varied clips, and nothing helps a set of clips like an internship. Unfortunately, many students wait too long to start looking for an internship, especially if they’re interested in getting one of the “big” ones.

Photo Credit: Leeni!, Flickr.

If you want to aim for one of the “big” internships — The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund — you need to start preparing almost a year in advance. The more time you have, the better prepared you’ll be and the easier it’ll be to supplement your application if you think you need additional materials or clips. Those three internships, for example, have deadlines for their summer internships around November 1. That’s roughly nine months between when your application is due and when the internship starts.

If you start searching early, you can also use the opportunity to create material specifically for your application that covers any weak areas you may have. For example, I decided I wanted to apply to the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, and the application was due near the end of March. Because I made the decision to apply in January, I was able to publish two front-page reporting pieces in my college newspaper, since all of my other published clips were opinion columns, and all my reporting work was for classes and thus hadn’t been printed.

Similarly, you can use the time before an internship application is due to round out your portfolio and diversify your skill set. Make a Soundslides presentation, or an audio reporting story for radio or podcast, or doing an investigative or data-driven CAR piece that will testify to your database skills.

Make sure you give yourself a week or two (at least) to polish your application up. It should go without saying that it should be completely free of grammatical and spelling errors, that you should spend a significant amount of time crafting an entertaining and entriguing cover letter, and that you should follow all the applications’ directions exactly. I recommend you sit down with an advisor or mentor to go over your clips and decide which are the strongest and how many to submit — it’s pretty rare for you to want to sumbit the maximum number of pieces allowed or all of your published work. For example, I have more than 60 pieces published in The Daily Aztec, but when I applied to an internship that asked for “no more than 20 pieces of puublished work,” I only submitted 17 clips, and I probably could have sent much less. It’s best to select a sample of your best work that reflects your range, and professors, adacedmic advisors and mentors will be better able to judge that.

Between the week or two of application polishing and the extra month or two to prepare additional material, and the actual span of time between the internship application itself, you should start preparing roughly one year before you plan to actually intern. If it’s a summer internship, you should decide to apply by September, because those applications are usually due in November. Fall internships should usually be decided by December or January, and Spring by late summer.

Planning is everything!

I am constantly surprised to see some of the stories that my fellow journalism students turn in, both for school and for publication in the the campus newspaper. Many of them are riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, or are overflowing with word fluff — that indirect way of writing that uses unnecessary words to up the word count. Many students don’t try to fix this until professors promise to dock 5 points for every error or unnecessary word.

Photo Credit: Eli_Reusch, Flickr.

I’ve heard students say that docking so many points (usually assignments are only worth 20) is too harsh, or that the “little” errors shouldn’t matter so much, or that it’s obvious what they were trying to say or the equivalent of “That’s what copy editors are for.” None of which is true.

Your story’s grammar matters.  Every error you make undermines your credibility — which is a fancy and polite way of saying that you look stupid and you make the paper look stupid. Readers will let you know it, too; I’ve gotten plenty of angry letters to the editor that say just that. “Are you stupid? I can’t believe you have the gall to call yourself a journalism student. You shouldn’t even be in college if you write a sentence like ‘The mothers asks from information.’ I’m appalled that my tax dollars are paying for your education, which is clearly a waste.”

Is this harsh? Maybe, but it isn’t just coming from exasperated professors and enraged copy editors. This is coming from readers in the general public, and they certainly have a point. Grammar mistakes — especially ones so basic as subject-verb agreement and the difference between “from” and “for” — make you look like an uneducated and careless writer, someone who isn’t particularly motivated by his or her job. You become someone who isn’t even striving for bland acceptability, much less excellence.

Such errors are easy enough to explain: it’s possible that the extra “s” was a simple typo, easy to do when you’re typing quickly, and that the “from” was really a misspelled “for” (or “fro”) that was automatically corrected by your word processing program. But that doesn’t matter, as far as readers and editors are concerned.  Either you are uneducated and unable to catch such mistakes — in which case you need to seriously re-evaluate your career choice or spend some time with a tutor — or you are lazy and didn’t do even a cursory re-read before you submitted the piece. Neither option is a good representation of you or your skills. This isn’t high school, where a C is average and a D means diploma.

True, everyone is human, and everyone makes mistakes, but they should be rare. The number of mistakes in a submitted piece directly reflect the amount of time and care you took when you wrote the piece in the first place…and the amount of time and care you took to edit it after writing it.

Your story’s word fluff matters too. Fluffy writing is boring writing. We all know it when we see it…and college students, especially, are extremely talented at using “fluffy” writing to extend a four-page paper to a required five pages.In journalism, length should always be trimmed as much as possible.

“The utilization of Lamaze, or other controlled-breathing techniques, may ameliorate the stress, anxiety and internal mental pressure that often occurs when one is in the process of beginning to give birth to an infant for the first time.”

Be honest. Gauge the fluffiness of your writing. Ask yourself: “Would I fall asleep reading this?” Many students admit, once they review their work more critically, that no, they wouldn’t want to read this. If you wouldn’t want to read it, no one else will want to either. Especially when you could have written:

“Breathing techniques, such as Lamaze, may help relieve the stress and pain that comes with labor.”

Finitely shorter — 16 words compared to 39 — and infinitely more interesting. Even if readers aren’t interested in Lamaze — hey, the sentence was over quickly, and they can move on.

Every error you make, every passive, verbose, “fluffy” sentence that you write, is one more thing for a copy editor to fix. A good editor can cut the word count of a story by 15 to 20 percent. If an editor is cutting more than that, it’s because you aren’t writing well. The more a copy editor has to fix, the more metaphorical balls he or she has to juggle, the more likely he or she is to miss something. I have no problem finding and fixing three errors in a well-written article or column. I have a serious problem having to rewrite every passive sentence, cut word fluff, fact check, grammar check, and move paragraphs around to achieve a more appropriate flow. There are more likely to be errors remaining undetected in the latter than the former.

Readers (and editors, and professors) judge you when you use bad grammar. They all judge when your submitted piece looks like you churned it out in 20 minutes without a cursory re-read, or when, to all appearances, you are elevating the word count with fluff instead of adding content.

I will address more specific grammar errors, and why certain kinds are hard to catch, regularly on Wednesdays, as well as the occasional tip on how to eliminate word fluff and make your writing more interesting. Until then, if you just start doing 10 minutes of editing before submitting work, I will be content.

[I would like to thank Mr. Peterson, my high school freshman honors English teacher, who's clever alliteration, "D means diploma!" inspired so many of us to strive for excellence.]

Earlier this year, Problogger started a series called “31 Days to Build a Better Blog,” which included a task for the day as well as a post to read. The project was converted into an eBook that now costs $19.95, but thatnks to SocialFishing, you (and I!) can still access each of those posts and tasks for free.

Here are the tasks and links to the corresponding Problogger posts:

1. Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog
2. Write a List Post
3. Promote a Blog Post
4. Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche
5. Email a Blog Reader
6. Must Read Advice from Successful Bloggers
7. Write a Link Post
8. Interlink Your Old Blog Posts
9. Join a Forum and Start Participating
10. Set Up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche
11. Come Up with 10 Post Ideas
12. Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog
13. Take a Trip to the ‘Mall’ and Improve Your Blog
14. Update a Key Page on Your Blog
15. Find a Blog Buddy
16. Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems
17. Watch a First Time Reader Use Your Blog
18. Create a Sneeze Page for Your Blog
19. Write an Opinion Post
20. Leave Comments on Other Blogs
21. Breathe Life Into an Old Post
22. Pay Special Attention to a Reader
23. Call Your Readers to ACTION
24. How to Use a Magazine to Improve Your Blog
25. Ask a Question: 10 Reasons Why Questions Work & 12 Tips on How to Ask Them
26. Improve Another Blog
27. Hunt for Dead Links
28. Write a “Review” Post
29. Develop a Plan to Boost Your Blog’s Profile and Readership Online
30. 17 Statistics to Monitor on Your Blog
31. Plan the Next Steps for Your Blog

I plan to follow these (someday in the future!) here.