Technolo-J

Tweeting in courtroom provides a new way to cover a murder trial

The Twitter trial seems to be working.  So far.

It's a modification of what we began last fall: live updates of a capital murder trial in the killing of a small-town Kansas sheriff. It was a way of live blogging from the courtroom.  I would email updates from my smartphone and Bluetooth keyboard and send them back to the online team at the newsroom.  They would post them with time stamps.

Readers enjoyed it, but the workflow lagged at times.  The copy desk during the day is sparse, usually one person posting all the updates throughout the day. Metro editors were in meetings all day. I was filing faster than the posts were appearing.  That was a snag we were going to have to work out.

This spring, as another big trial loomed, the copy desk said they couldn’t handle another round of live blogging.  People are going on vacation.  We're short-staffed. There was no time to sort through my updates each hour.

The trial: Ted Burnett is accused of killing Chelsea Brooks, a 14-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in June 2006, during a murder-for-hire.

When jury selection began this week, I decided to start posting updates on Twitter.

Jury selection is usually the most boring part of any trial. 

“This is the part they don’t show on TV, it’s so exciting,” prosecutor Kevin O’Connor tells jurors.

Most times, we don’t even cover it.  But capital murder trials are different.  The juries not only decide whether a defendant is guilty.  If they return a conviction on capital murder, the jury also decides whether or not the defendant will receive the death penalty.  With life and death at stake, I like to know who is sitting on the jury.

But jury selection also seemed to be ideal to conduct experiments.  Who would notice? So I began tweeting portions of the part of the trial no one seems to care about.  Most were tidbits that probably wouldn’t make it in any stories I wrote for the print edition.

Some of the Twitter highlights:

Prosecutor told the judge one prospective juror "appears to be stoned."

•  "I don't know if this is a legal reason," O'Connor said, "but the state's position is he should be dismissed because he's a punk."
  
  
• Prosecutor: "Do you have any concerns about the criminal justice system?" Juror: "Some people in the system are criminals themselves."
  
  
• Lawyer: "Do you understand some of the things you've heard about the case may not be accurate?" Juror: "Sure, especially from the media."

You get the idea.

I didn't expect the reaction..

I received an email from a Wichita police officer following the trial on Twitter, saying "Keep it up."

A woman tweeted her friends, “Court TV is gone but Twitter has @rsylvester.”

(Actually, it’s now “In Session” on TruTV and I do some work for them, too).

But this is important to me, becaise they are local people, looking for local news. They’re not readers or viewers or audience anymore – in this world of social networking, they’re my friends. I like that.

I keep getting notices that more people are following me each day.

 Jill, my editor, is encouraging me .

 Katie, our online content developer, is working on a widget to put my tweets on Kansas.com, when the trial really gets going.

Here’s what I’m learning:

• Keep it professional.  Remain a reporter.  Resist the urge to comment or editorialize.  Just tell what’s going on and give context.
  
  
•  Pick the most engaging parts to report.  Remember, I have to take notes and try not to miss anything important.  I try to Twitter the parts that catch my attention and which I think are important from my experience on the beat.  Even in capital murder trials, there are lighter moments.  But also select the parts that will increase awareness and knowledge of the event.
  
  
• Keep it clean. I mean copy. You have to proof read yourself.  Remember, there’s no copy desk between you and publishing. And if I remember correctly, they don’t have time for this, anyway.
  
  
• Check to see if anyone is replying.  It’s tough to do on a mobile site that isn’t fully functional, as it is on a desktop.  I post with text messages but occasionally check through the Web to see if there are any responses. One of my new friends had to contact me on Facebook to point out I was missing her replies.  I also try to go back at the end of the day and see who I missed.  I don’t know if it’s bad form to reply something like 10 hours later, but I want folks to know I’m paying attention.

 Yes, it’s the same as Intro to Journalism.  Know your audience; get it right. But in this delivery system it’s live, and it’s fast.  I keep reminding myself, I can’t cut corners.  Good journalism should shoot for high standars, even in bits of 140 characters at a time.

And at a limit of 140-character, Twitter forces you to write tight.

It’s hard work.  I leave court feeling exhausted

And it’s only the first week.   The intense and exciting part – the real evidence of the trial - is yet to begin.

What, you want me to teach reporters multimedia?

Culture can change as quickly in the newsroom as an editor can slap a new lead on a story.

Just a few weeks ago, I wondered if anyone outside our online team – which I had been banished from sometime last summer – got or cared about Web-first publishing or multimedia journalism or Web 2.0.

Then through a series of b-and-moaning (me) and firings (someone else, thankfully), I was assigned to Jill, full-time metro editor, part-time blogger and sometimes Tweeter.

In addition to keeping up with my little experiments, such as my live blogging jury selection of a capital murder trial on Twitter, Jill wrote me into our team goals as a “multimedia trainer.”  Evidently, Jill figured my last year of learning how to use a video camera, editing software and hooking up microphones to audio records should be passed onto the rest of our staff.

Beginning this month, I’m supposed to begin showing the three other reporters in our corner of the newsroom the basics.  It’s the beginning of a newsroom DIY-training.

It seemed only weeks ago people with the title “editor” were asking me to cut it out with the electronic toys, as they had told me in earlier years to stop developing narratives and stick to the inverted pyramid.

Culture can change quickly in newsrooms.  So if you sometimes feel like one of the only ones trying to do something new, don’t get frustrated.  Just keep plugging away.

It’s kind of like that project I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and now – because of a murder trial – has to be once again put on hold.  But news of the moment takes priority.  And there’s always news of the moment. Eventually, there will be time for enterprise.

Eventually, someone will grasp what you’re trying to do.

Meanwhile, follow my experiments on Twitter.  You'll hear about stoned "punk" jurors and what men facing a death penalty trial say about newspaper subscriptions.  Really.

TwitterLocal tells what everyone is talking about

For the past week, I’ve been watching the TwitterLocal Feed, recommended by Mark Hamilton. You subscribe to all the local tweets in your feed reader.

Back in the old days of some 15 years ago, I had a great editor who would make an effort to scour the town and find out what people were talking about in coffee shops and bars, around water coolers and parks.  He would constantly ask reporters, “What are people talking about.  That’s what where we ought to look for stories.”

With TwitterLocal, I can find out what people are talking about on my phone.  Every once in a while, they’re even talking about what we’re reporting.

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the new technology to serve our own purposes of disseminating information.  But I’m reminded we need to also take time to use it to learn more about the people we are hoping to reach.

Few in the newsroom can find strength in numbers through social networking

Jack Lail and I are now connected.  Jack is the managing editor of  multimedia for the Knoxville News Sentinel, a paper that’s been a leader in the push toward online.

 Jack blogged an invitation to “be sociable” and connect to him on Facebook, Linked-in and other social networks. So I did.

We’re a part of a growing, yet feisty group of people trying to meet the demands of a changing industry. And we need to stick together.

Ryan Sholin talked about trying to find the early adopters in each newsroom, and what a struggle that has been for him:

“The important part of the job isn’t speaking to the first 20 people on the conference call for an hour, it’s maintaining contact with the one person on the call who has the potential to Get It”

It’s a struggle for all of us.  Think about it.  If there’s only one, or two, or even a handful of people who are trying to make the shift in our mindset, that means there are many more resisting.  It can be a lonely space.  We need to support each other as much as possible.

So let’s connect, stick together.  I’m passing forward Jack’s invite to “be sociable.”

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A new multimedia project, in duet

Collaboration is to be the next step in my multimedia journey.

It’s a natural progression, and a welcome one.  The past year of learning has at times been a lonely process.  But it’s been necessary.  It’s hard to work with someone else, when you don’t know how the process works.  It’s one reason I took a Flash course.  I’m not a designer, but it helps to understand how it all works.  Reporters who don't at least understand the basics of audio and video, hoping the photo department will pick it up, is destined to frustrate some photographers and videographers.

Last week, photographer Jaime Oppenheimer and I worked on the drug court story.  This week, we got more ambitious and embarked on our new project.  We’re still putting the details together, and I’ll post it here once we finish.  But I thought I’d share the process as we go.

We went to prison.  It was a guided tour, but the state officials were gracious and pretty much left us alone to do our reporting.  We spent hours, and Jaime left her still camera in the car.  She shot everything with a Sony HD cam, and she’ll pull stills off the video.  She hooked up a shotgun mic to the camera, and lugged a heavy tripod along.

I took along my Edirol09 and a pair of earphones to collect some natural sound, interviews and pick up some parts that might augment Jaime’s video.

I was stoked with the information and images and stories we collected in those hours. Jaime, however, felt a little overwhelmed. 

It reminded me of the different roles we’d played in the past and how they’re converging in a world of online, multimedia delivery.  As a reporter, I can never get too much information.  I can pick out the best of the best.  I had collected interviews and documents for months.  This was just the color to trim out and dress up the other information.

Jaime had all the images and sounds swimming through her head. She’d filled up two hours of video cards.  How were we going to sort it all out?

Other aspects overwhelm me, such as the thought of actually editing the video.  To me, that’s the hard part.  No problem, said Jaime.  That doesn’t bother her.

That’s where collaboration begins.  On the long drive home we talked about what we remembered about the visit.  We listed the images that stood out in our minds, the sounds, the quotes.  We made a list.  Then from there, we asked ourselves, what would be better told in video?  In stills?  What audio stood out?  What anecdotes would be better detailed in narrative text?

Soon, we had outlined a short video, numbering the scenes in order and the audio bed that would go underneath it.  I don’t think either one of us had actually scripted a video before.  It at least gave us a starting point.

Jaime has the day off today.  I’m going to try to edit some audio tracks, and then give them to Jaime to pick out some images for another video or a slide show.

When I write the story, that will further cut down our material, because we’ve decided we want the multimedia to add layers and depth, not repeat what’s in the story.

Next week, we’ll begin putting it all together. I'm excited at the prspects  I think I'm going to like this role of co-producer.

A slide show before dinner, a video in an hour

A year ago, I sat in front of computer for hours, trying to make the sound synch with the movement of the lips in I-Movie, or make Final Cut Pro reach some sort of finality.  Usually, my frustration would hit its peak long before my wife sent me a text message wanting to know when I was going to get the hell home.

I don’t know when exactly I began to feel more comfortable with all this, but I know it came, the same way I learned to write over the years, because I was too stubborn to give it up. I am now trying to include multimedia in nearly everything I do, because I appreciate how those layers can add depth to the story.  Just as writing through the difficult times made me a better reporter, so is being persistent with multimedia.

Two stories the past week made me realize how comfortable I've become looking for the multimedia aspects of the stories I cover.

The first: a story about drug court. These kinds of courts are prevalent throughout much of the United States, but they’re new to Kansas.  Photographer Jaime Oppenheimer worked to get a couple of dozen photos, and helped collect audio. And as I’ve said before, I’m recording everything.

Between Jaime’s photos, some interviews I’d recorded and some live bits from the courtroom, became  an audio slideshow.  I like being able to hear the judge explain what he does and how it plays out in court. I was able to edit the audio and put together the slideshow, while me editor gave the story a first read.  I took a break from the multimedia, worked on the story, then went to finish the slide show.  I was home by dinner.

But multimedia is not only about audio and video. I especially liked getting copies of the essays some of the people who had gone through the program had written for their graduation.  Christy Johnson's essay has power to it I could not have conveyed in my story alone.

Today’s story was one of those assignments you get when you have a slow day on your own beat, and editors are asking for a story. This time of year, people purposefully set fires in Kansas, called controlled burns. It’s actually good for the environment and helps restore the native prairies on the Great Plains.

I’ve taken to carrying a video camera everywhere I go, so when I went on the assignment, I pulled it out and shot some video.

Howard Owens says reporters should take no longer than an hour to make a video.  The controlled burn video, well, won’t set anything on fire.  But it showed what I was writing about, something I couldn’t tell them quite as well as actually seeing it. And it took about an hour. 

I think shooting the video actually helped with what I ended up writing, because it forced me to pay more attention to detail, looking through the lens of the camera.  The video camera served as a notebook, and the quotes that didn’t fit in the video, went in the story.

Once again, I made it part of my workday.  I plugged the camera in and downloaded the video, while I wrote a rough draft of the story.  I pulled quotes out of the video for the story and put the audio track on the timeline.  I went and added the quotes to my story, and while my editor Jill Cohan gave the story a first read, I finished the video and uploaded it to the server.  Then I answered Jill’s questions, put the final polish on it, and went home.

All before my wife could send me a text message, asking where the hell I was.

A rant from Iowa State

Michael Bugeja directs a journalism school in 21^st Century America, where he preaches that the Internet and new technology is “the scorpion” that will poison and kill journalism.

In what I consider the best argument against tenure, Bugeja cursed the connected world that is rapidly passing him by in the keynote address at our Midwest regional spring conference for the Society of Professional Journalists.  The theme of the conference?  Convergence of new media.  

Yes, this guy.  Bugeja says new gadgetry has us chained to our newsroom desks, forcing us to do all of our reporting through the telephone and email.  By the way, he says telephones and telegraphs are not bad.  Apparently, he thinks any innovation that happened, say, after Henry Ford, is dooming us.

“I don’t know when he was last in a newsroom,” said Jared Strong of the Des Moines Register, who sat in on the panel “What I Wish I Had Learned in Journalism School But  Didn’t.”

If Bugeja had bothered to observe some modern newsrooms, he would know that technology actually allows me to get out of the office more, be where the news is, because I’m always connected through my smart phone, my email and my ability to deliver the news through a variety of media, including Twitter.

Of course, Bugeja hates Twitter.  And Facebook.  And really any of the ways that people like to connect now and trade information.

I began covering his speech on Twitter.

Andy Dickinson answered that maybe Bugeja is just trying to get attention.

The most disturbing part of Bugeja’s views is, he could be any of our bosses.  In many newsrooms across the country, people are resisting change with his same fervor, as the world changes around us.  In his speech, he kept referring to himself as “a reporter,” as if that some how brought him out of his academic daydream and down to reality with the rest of us.  It didn’t.

If he really worked as a reporter, in a world without tenure, he would have to face the realities of technology.  He would have to learn new ways or reporting, or he would soon be without a job.  He would soon be called into an editor’s office and be told to get up to speed, or be replaced.  But he doesn’t work in that world of declining circulations and ad revenue that’s moving to the web.  So he can stick his head up his campus and pretend that he knows best.

I felt bad for the journalism students I met at Iowa State who are bright and ambitious and having to listen to this. I felt bad for the older journalists in the room, meaning about my age, because some were nodding and smiling as if this were really making sense.

Still, Bugeja showed he has a glimmer of recognition for reality. For all his resistance, he understands the Web can produce transparency in journalism, allowing our audience to study our notes, our source documents, to hear our interviews.

Don’t feel sorry for his students, either.  They’re smart enough to see the ironies of the chancing media world around them and how out of touch the director of their school seems to be.

“The thing is,” one student told me about Bugeja, “you can only reach him by email.”

Your neighborhood news web site

The Palm Beach Post wants to deliver news to the neighborhoods.  I’m not talking about those old “Neighbors” sections that languished and failed so miserably in our print editions.

I’m talking about Backyard Post.

It took William Harnett and his crew 574 days to pull it off, but who’s counting?  It features an interactive map, where users can click on their neighborhood and find out about schools, parks, libraries, and even create their own pages to share news and connect with their neighbors.  What you see know is just the start of what Harnett and the Post envision.

“Why shouldn’t the local newspaper be the party that delivers that level of detail and organization to its community?” Harnett writes. “Think of the value you can build on top of that foundation of neighborhoods. Not just value for your users, but value as well for the 80 percent of local businesses in your typical market that don’t consume any form of newspaper advertising.”

 This is what newspapers sought to do, but couldn’t quite accomplish, with those failed “Neighbors” sections.

It’s an ambitious project but yet another idea of how newspaper web sites can reach through the computer lines and into people’s homes, no longer simply being the rolled up piece of paper at the edge of the curb.

Go live

Angelique van Engelen of ReporTwitters, and my newest friend on Wired Journalists, introduced me to a utility that looks like it could be very valuable to online reporters.

 Cover It Live is a new blogging tool to help reporters, well, cover live events.

“Your commentary publishes in real time like an instant message,” Cover It Live’s web site said. “Our ‘one-click’ publishing lets you drop polls, videos, pictures, ads and audio clips as soon as they come to mind.”

I realized the power of live blogging this past fall while covering a capital murder trial. It’s an easy way to get into the online conversation.  It’s a little unnerving for those used to waiting until the end of the day to write, and you have to be good at multitasking. But if we couldn’t do that we wouldn’t be in journalism.

Angelique’s ReporTwitters also seeks to help reporters figure out how to use Twitter as a professional tool.

Back to nature: rambling thoughts from an unplugged week

I unplugged.

I took the first week of vacation time during spring break from school, so we could play together, just chill, as the 16-yearold would say, and most importantly unplug from the various wires that keep us connected.

I twittered maybe once or twice the whole week.  We took everyone to Eureka Springs, AR, and my wife purposely booked a two-story cabin that advertised “no wireless internet” and “no cell phone coverage.”  It drove the teens a little nuts.  They would sneak out of the cabin and trudge up the road until one would hear the other say, “I’ve got bars.  Yes!”  At least it got them to hike.

The blog lagged but my life rejuvenated.  It reminded me we all need to unplug every once in a while.

When I returned, I found this post by Mindy McAdams with some excellent tips on how to plan and carry out a multimedia package.

It’s something we all need to think about. We’ve talked about learning the essentials over the past year, getting audio and video, trying not to let it take up too much of our time.  We  also need to try to pull all those elements together into a cohesive package for the web.

As Mindy says: “The best time to tackle these attributes of the package is at the beginning — not at the end.”

Also catching my attention in the reader, Howard Owens pointed me to this article in the New Yorker about the "death and life of the American newspaper."

Now I’m ready to plug back in again…

Newsflash: A reporter brings back compelling video without eating up her day

Lisa Fernandez of the Mercury News recently blogged on News Videographer about a video she produced to illustrate a story she reported about a toddler who died in a pond.

 Fernandez’s video is a great example of what reporters can do with multimedia without putting half their day into it.  Fernandez went to the sight where the child died and shot the pond from different angles.

 

“I pieced the shots together, no sound just the sound of the water running, and while this video is not a standalone (it needs to be read with the whole piece) I think it aided visually for anyone who wanted to see how this could have happened.

“Three editors came over to me while I was putting this together and said, ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like.’

She said it didn’t take any extra time out of her day.

You don’t have to have a backpack full of equipment or spend a lot of time to provide an interesting layer to your stories. It doesn’t have to rise to the level of documentary.  It can just be an illustration to help deepen understanding of the story.

Lisa’s video should stand as an inspiring example to those who may be intimidated when they’re handed a small camera and asked to “get some video.”  With a little thought, you can bring back a powerful piece.

Dogging the page views

Stan Finger set a new record for our web site Kansas.com with his story about a man arrested for having sex with a dog. I’ve provided a link but don’t click on it: you’ll just drive up the numbers.

The popularity of the story does remind me of H.L. Mencken's observation that “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Stan’s story broke records for page views that were set during our coverage of the tornado in Greensburg, which was a national story.  It also cemented Stan in first place in our new game, the unofficial race for clicks on the web page.

That friendly rating began a couple of months back when our fearless senior producer Jeff Butts realized he could search page views by byline.

At last count, Stan had about 10 times the rating as my measly second-place finish.  To be fair,, he would be leading without the dog story. (Note to self: find a kinky sex story to post as breaking news).

But it is valuable to know who is drawing traffic on our web site.

The answer is simple.  The people who drive the traffic are, for the most part, the reporters who think web first.

Stan and I both report on the crime beat.  So does Hurst Laviana, who’s also in the top 5. Hurst does investigative pieces and is a database guru.  He recently wrote a story about the decline in parolee crime in Kansas.

Joe Stumpe, our food writer, also leads the traffic count. He has recipes and who doesn’t use the web to get recipes these days?

But one of the real signs of how are industry is changing is from sportswriter and blogger Jeffrey Martin.  Jeff’s K-Stated blog is showing how well people respond to blogs as away to get their news.

“Our blogs are just now beginning to get as many views as our stories,” Jeff Butts said.

There’s also a lively discussion at Wired Journalists on how newsrooms are trying to get more people involved in thinking about the web first.

What we’re finding is there’s no magic to getting people to read your stories on the web.  You just have to post them there, early and often.

And Jeff Butts says anytime you can get the word “sex” in the online headline, that helps.

Hot links

After a busy week of deadlines, I'm using the weekend to catch up on some reading:

• Comedy is easy.  Audio is hard.  Cyndy Green keeps sound in synch by giving good advice on which microphones are best.
• Mindy McAdams provides a thought-provoking discussion about the differences between traditional media “audiences” and on-line “communities.”  Be sure to read the comments.
• Multimedia means just that: video, text, data all working together.  Here's a great example of putting it all together. (via Multimedia Shooter)
• What’s an asset we all need to develop?  Speed, says Adam Tinworth.  Some of us aren’t reacting fast enough to provide news for the digital audience.

And of course, I’m posting that link four days later. Need to get faster.

 

Getting started: Moving to that place on-line, where we all need to be.

The latest edition of The Quill offers tips and tricks to surviving in an on-line world.

OK, I did write one of the articles.

But be sure and read the excellent tips on:

Collecting audio by Vincent Duffy of Michigan Public Radio.

Getting into video by Angela Grant of the San Antonio Express-News.

How to put it all together for print and on-line by John Straus of the Indianapolis Star

And being a hyper-local mojo (mobile journalist) by Bob Dunn of InstantNewsNetwork.com and founder of FortBendNow.com.

Good tips by all and worth reading whether you're just getting started or have been doing it for a while.

One question:  Why am I the one who gets called old?

Fitting multimedia into the workday

My multimedia goal now usually is to get home in time for dinner.

I’m only partially kidding.  My first year created some long, hard hours of learning.  I knew I was straining patience when I would begin receiving text messages from my wife, about 9 p.m.  The learning was worth it, and this year my goal is to integrate multimedia into my regular workday.  That means getting home for dinner on time.

I did that with two pieces that week.

The first involved a new medical residency in Wichita, the first of its kind in the nation, geared toward training doctors for the challenges of practicing medicine in developing nations.

When I went to interview the doctors who were building this program, I took a video camera and recorded them.  The story didn’t really fit video. I ended up with a bunch of talking heads.  The doctors did have some incredible pictures they’d brought back with them from their travels, however.

I took the audio track off the video, exported it as an MP3, edited it in Audacity and used it with the photos for a slide show.

That did take some time.  But I finished the story and composed the multimedia while my editor was working the text.  I did have to stop once, and pick up my high school son from track practice, but I was able to come back and finish it, no problem.

A couple of days later, I was scheduled to work a Saturday shift.  Saturday being a slow news day, editors usually try to find a quick-turnaround feature of an event happening that day. 

This day, I was assigned to cover the annual festival of the statewide honors bands and choirs.  These are the kinds of assignments as a young journalist, I would dread. But after 30 years in journalism and playing dad to several kids, I love these kinds of stories.  Not only have I been to my share of events, I like this idea.  It’s the musical equivalent of all-state in basketball.

I thought it might make a good video.  The challenge with all video, but especially music, is to capture good audio.  Because this was an acoustic concert, there was no sound system to plug into.  The camera mic picked up audience noise, and this is the cold season, so plenty of coughing and wheezing in the background.

I experimented with something I’d wanted to try for some time now, but hadn’t had the courage – or the time – to figure out:  recording audio separately.

I took out my Edirol-09 mp3 recorder.  I turned on the “automatic gain control” (AGC), because I would be shooting video and couldn’t ride the levels manually.  This way, the sound would adjust itself.  I set it on the stage in front of the band and went about shooting video.

I’d worried about the time in learning how to synch the audio with the video.  I’d read about it, and even learned that’s the reason for the clapboard you see sometimes associated with old movies.

I did it this way:

Back at the editing station, I downloaded the mp3 from the Edirol. I edited the song I wanted using Audacity and imported it to the time line of Final Cut Pro, which is the video editing software we use.  I then pulled in the video clip of the same song to the timeline.

I watched the conductor’s visual cues.  When he brought his hands down to signal the band to play, I stopped it (with the space bar).  I then lined up my audio track to that point.  I played both the terrible sound from the camera with the imported track to make sure they were playing together.  Then I muted the audio track from the camera to make sure it looked and sounded right.  I cut in some close-ups and b-roll.

The result is this video.

It won’t win any awards, but really most of what we do on a daily basis is to inform, to entertain, to illustrate.  My target audience on this video was to get the attention of the parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters of the students who made the honors band.  And I liked picking the kids from the smallest schools in Kansas, Classes 1A-4A.

It didn’t take me forever. I made it home for supper. I even made it home in time to make dinner.  My own high schooler appreciated that.