For obvious reasons, I don’t broadcast my opinions in stories. However, I think it’s silly to act like I don’t have anything to say about them. Reporters are people, not beacons of robotic objectivity.
Here’s what I think about a few of my recent Daily Dot stories:
Cam girls share their secrets (with each other) and A peep inside the camming business
This was originally one story, but my editor wanted to divide it into community and business aspects, since not everyone is familiar with the term “cam girl” in the first place.
The day these stories went live, I wrote a quick blurb on my Tumblr about how tough it was to access the cam girl community. For about a week I sent out queries on forums and indie sites, trying to get that first interview. On the forum I would eventually profile, it took several days for me to prove to them I was who I said I was and not a horny guy trying to get a free Skype session. But once one woman decided I was telling the truth, the floodgates opened. I ended up getting eight different interviews, when I was hoping for three at best.
Once inside, secrecy continued to be an issue (and in that line of work, I can definitely understand). Though every woman used an alternate pseudonym while camming, several asked for me to give them a third fake name in the story. Others encouraged me to link directly to their cam sites, and I did. (Did I mention these stories are completely NSFW?)
I’m not usually nervous about what sources think when a story comes out, but this one had me sweating. The story took a month to complete — a week of research, a week of writing (between all my regular story assignments), and two weeks of editing just to make sure it was 100 percent accurate. I specifically chose not to link to the forum I profiled since it was a safe haven for these women. But was I still compromising them?
The day it went up, I posted it on their forum and held my breath. Most women said it was accurate, which is the best compliment a reporter can hope for.
“I love the balance between being realistic that not everything is rainbows and unicorns but also saying it’s not the slavish hell-hole that most people think it is,” one woman said in what was my favorite comment.
But it wasn’t all good. Some women were upset that I’d lifted quotes from the forum. Even though the people quoted had given me permission, the women had now decided that it might help people Google their forum. I really didn’t want to make an edit to the story (that’s basically admitting to the public that I made a mistake, and I never want to edit if I haven’t actually made a factual error) so I showed them how to remove the site from Google. But they didn’t want to do that, either. Eventually, they just deleted the quotes. All’s well that ends well.
Image credit: Bill Boulden
Every day he’s shuffling
First of all, puns are my guilty pleasure, so I am overly proud of getting that title approved. Get it? He’s a rapper AND he plays card games!
Overall, my profile on Tha Gatherin was the most enjoyable story I’ve written so far at the Daily Dot. I’ve played Magic: The Gathering for years so I didn’t have to worry about getting the technical details wrong.
Bill was, frankly, the kind of guy I’d like to get a beer with, or since I don’t drink beer, play a casual game of Magic. Like me, he gets his energy to keep creating from the enthusiasm of the fandom around him. Best of all, he had a really great sense of humor and didn’t get offended when I said things like, “Isn’t the idea of being a guy who raps about card games kind of silly?” (In fact, the band’s name was originally in jest, but just stuck.)
“I thought, what would a rapper’s Magic name be? It started as a funny idea,” he said in a quote I decided to use in the story. “The sheer ridiculousness of it is lovable in itself.”
I was so comfortable, in fact, that I misspelled his name consistently throughout the story and not even my editor caught it. (Bill caught it himself on Twitter after the story went up.) This is an example of when it doesn’t pay to be too comfortable with the sources you’re covering. Believe me, I took pains to make sure nothing like that happened on the cam girl story.
Photo credit: Timothy Madison
The Internet Tough Guy remains a mystery
I’m proud of this because I figured out something Reddit’s hive mind couldn’t, or wouldn’t, solve. For me, this story illustrated why what I’m doing is actually worthwhile — somebody needs to fact check the Internet.
Redditors took for granted that it was the same guy in both pictures, (and the guy himself, a Farker circa 2009, didn’t exactly do much to quell the hype.
That said, this story would have been a LOT better if I could have gotten in touch with Timothy Madison, the “after” guy, himself. Unfortunately, he doesn’t update his Fark or YouTube very often, and those were the only ways I could find to reach him.
I hope this was interesting for anyone who wonders about, to borrow a line from Susannah Breslin, how your journalism sausage is made. I’ve got plenty of opinions about all (66 as of this writing) my stories, so if you’d like to hear about them “behind the scenes,” I’d be happy to keep talking.