How to teach accuracy to journalists
I recently wrote a guest article offering tips for teaching accuracy for J-Source, a website run by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, Below is an excerpt. Go here to read the whole thing. And please share your thoughts in the comments.
During a recent talk at Ryerson University, I asked the students in attendance if the school had a policy of a lowering the grade on an assignment if it contained a factual error, such as a misspelled name. The students all nodded their heads.
Well, that’s a start.
When I was studying journalism at Concordia University, the policy was that a student would lose a letter grade if they misspelled a name in a class assignment. We were informed of this on the first day of classes. My reporting and writing teacher also told a story about a promising young student who lost a prized internship because her submission included a misspelling of the name of a well-known local columnist.
The message was clear: don’t make mistakes.
Accuracy came up in other classes during my four years at Concordia, as I’m sure it does in every journalism program. Ryerson, for example, offers a course that teaches magazine fact checking. Most copy editing classes will also help students learn to edit out mistakes. These are all helpful lessons and areas of instruction. But after discovering a remarkable program being run at the Tilburg School of Journalism in the Netherlands, I started thinking about what we aren’t teaching students — or professionals, for that matter — when it comes to accuracy.
Here’s a description of the Tilburg program from my recent Columbia Journalism Review column:
Starting last fall, the school, part of Fontys University of Applied Sciences, has recruited fourth-year journalism students to participate in three-week long fact checking programs. Each morning, the students gather in a room to review the day’s news and identify stories that seem questionable. Then they go to work, hitting the phones and other sources to pull suspicious stories apart and see if they hold up to scrutiny. As of today, roughly 80 per cent of the stories checked have contained some form of factual mistake, according to instructor and Dutch journalist Theo Dersjant. Their findings are published on a blog. Now, the people behind this program are hoping other journalism programs around the world will use the model to teach students about the importance of accuracy, and help keep local media in check.
This is a wonderful twist on how journalism students are typically taught accuracy. The Tilburg method uses real-life examples, which in turn means the students face real consequences if they falsely accuse a media outlet of making a mistake. (Students are punished for any errors by being forced to handdeliver a pie and an apology to the offended party, which is great because it’s important there be consequences for errors.)
This program helps students develop first-rate bullshit detectors, and it also shows them how professional journalists go wrong. The latter is essential information when trying to avoid future errors. But here’s where I think schools and professional newsrooms fall short: they offer little or no actual instruction in how to prevent errors …
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