As a teen and young adult in college, I wasn’t a fan of research papers – especially the kind that were super restrictive.
It wasn’t necessarily the amount of required sources or even the type of sources, I really disliked having to write on a topic I didn’t believe or have interest in.
I mean, let’s be serious here, my first research papers in high school were limited to physical literature for 95% of the work then only trusted online sources that teachers verified beforehand.
I mean, back then Wikipedia was in its toddler years and rife with incorrect data.
Things got a little better in college up until my research led me to obscure or out-of-print books for references and that led to me spending a chunk of my own money to acquire them.
As it is, I still have those books and am not parting ways with
them any time soon.
As always, the writing part was the easiest and eventually, I was able to use my wordsmithing skills to make back the money I lost on those specialty books.
Fact-checking, researching, and crafting research papers also honed another skill that benefits me every week – due diligence.
Depending on where you’ve heard that term, you have a different definition for it.
But, I’ve always used a very basic and vague description that outlines “due diligence” as conducting an investigation, review, or audit to verify facts and information about a particular subject.
Now that I’m out of the academic realm, I’m still applying those concepts to my life almost daily.
I do a bit of consumer research on advertised products that seem too good to be true or new technology tools.
I even check out other people’s product reviews when choosing to buy something.
Other recent due diligence moments include helping my mom decide on the most cost-effective and healthiest recipes to try for dinner any given day of the week.
In journalism, due diligence is one of the basic tenets of reporting and writing – you have to have all the facts in front of you to do your job to the best of your ability.
Without correct facts, a journalist can set themselves and their employer up for a multitude of problems.
However, we run into exceptions to that rule when governmental, corporate, personal, and organizational officials withhold information.
Withholding information makes our jobs nearly impossible to accomplish and further widen the disconnect between the public and them.
For me, that includes things like the proposed city charter changes, the city’s communications manager job posting, and a number of rumors circulating on social media.
While I don’t have nearly enough space to explain the possible charter changes, I can tell you that whoever the city hires for that communications manager position will not make it.
It takes less than 10 minutes of Google searching to see that those 40-plus job functions outlined create an overlap of a workload for several different people – a Public Information Officer, social media manager, event planner, brand manager, marketing manager, public relations specialist, and copywriter.
Each of those individual jobs alone have annual salaries ranging from $60,000-100,000 or more depending on experience while the city is offering $56,000-76,000.
Due diligence would show you where you could consolidate those functions into several full time employees and possibly contract workers to maximize efficiency and skills.
Expecting one full-time employee to do all of that work is just setting them and the city up for failure.