InkTank

". . . must be satire piece, right??" I wish.

A recent article on MSNBC.com reported that Transocean Ltd. has handed out safety bonuses to its' top executives. This same company, contracts with BP, and ran the oil rig that exploded causing the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

This tragedy killed 11 workers and caused the worst marine environmental crisis in the history of the United States.

 

I will critique the coverage of the article in a moment, but due to the content of the article I can't help but agree with what one reader commented on the article.

This news article must be a satire piece, right??

I wish.

Unfortunately, this is a straightforward news articles put together by professional journalists. Overall, it's done well.

Here is how the article opens.

Why so serious?

Last week I was sent to the Supreme Court to cover oral arguments on a video game restriction law in California. The hearing was actually quite entertaining and I was excited at the chance to write a story about it.

As usual, before I turned my article in to my editor, I checked to see how other major publications  chose to write about the arguments. The story that captured my attention the most was one in the New York Times.

This article had a good balance of serious and intrigue. The Court that day had been in rare form, and those watching broke out into laughter on  more than one occassion - mostly on account of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”

“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”

While the NYT article provided adequate background information, it added an extra element that is missing in a lot of journalism today: human interest. There is certainly a fine line between making a story interesting and editorializing, but I think this article is an excellent model.

Another story on why the Tea Party sucks

Most of the stories I have read on the Tea Party movement are relentless - and that is entirely what I expect on the editorial pages. But the same sentiment has found its way to the news page as well.

In a Washington Post article from Sunday, Oct. 24 the paper presented findings after what seemed to be a lengthy investigation on the Tea Party as a whole. The Post attempted to contact every Tea Party "group" and, in essence, verify their existence. After making sure they did actually exist, the Post then asked them questions about their chief concerns - which of course included their thoughts about the president's race and religion, since that is all the Tea Party really cares about.

Maybe I'm just a bit too conventional for these modern day "call out the stupid group (any conservative group, of course) and give them grief" journalists and so I'm being too harsh, but I just think Tea Party coverage is ridiculously biased. 

My favorite parts of the article are the quotes by one of the most uneducated person in the group - and the article then acts as though that is a decent representation from the group as a whole. Obviously, all Tea Party members hate Obama because he’s black and they, of course, think he is a Muslim....and a socialist. Or at least the Post would let you think so.

Fighting Over the News

Tony Danza becomes a tenth grade English teacher, Lady Gaga goes political and Steven Colbert is a main reason people tuned into the recent immigration hearing.

I read an article the other day titled The World’s Most Influential 16-year-old Bloggers. One of these ‘kids’ made $5, 000 in the first month of launching his blog.

Now I don’t know about everyone else but I feel semi-defeated.

I didn’t spend four years day-dreaming through math classes about becoming a journalist so that I could compete with celebrities and 16-year-olds with a smart phone.  

What is going on?

More importantly what can we do to revert the attention to the actual news media? There is such an availability of mediums and information that I’m beginning to wonder what being a journalist is going to mean when I graduate. I also feel like I have no right to complain because I still have a fighting chance. There are people in news rooms who have spent their post-grad lives making a name for themselves and now have to compete with me; a kid with less experience but a better understanding of converged media.

Fear leads to declined coverage in Mexico

Two weeks ago I stood feet away in a courtroom from the two killers responsible for Washington D.C.’s deadliest shooting since the mid-1990s. That morning I was at the scene, helping a reporter get quotes from neighbors and taking note of the carnage that remained—a few flecks of human flesh on the sidewalk and a bullet-sized hole in a concrete step. The two men that killed four and injured six people, looked down at the ground sheepishly as they and I awaited their final ruling.

If I was covering a similar case in Mexico, I would be dead. I would not enter the courtroom. I would not head to the scene. I would not leave the newsroom if I wanted to live.

What's up with newspapers? I dunno, lemme read 3 more paragraphs to find out...

We learned in class the 'secret' theory to a strong news article, and the first few steps involves creating the first four paragraphs to be the strongest building blocks for the rest of the story. An article in The Independent, James Murdoch Signals Reduced Role for His Family's Newspapers by Stephan Foley, is an excellent illustration...of what NOT to do.

Though I still struggle with those building blocks myself, I could tell that Foley had yet to discover that secret (!!) theory. That and dictionary (or heck, spell check); his article had five spelling errors, two of which were in the lede! Take Foley's second paragraph though:

Rupert Murdoch, son of Australian newspaper owner, built News Corp into one of the most formidible newspaper businesses in the world, owner of The Times and The Sun in the UK and, since 2007, The Wall Street Journal in the US. But at an investor conference in Barcelona yesterday, his son--who is now chairman of News Corp's businesses in Asia and Europe--said that the company's newspapers and journalism would decline in importance.

Hype for Hyperlocal

 If anyone has been following the growing trends of news gathering in a town with vanishing newspapers, it's Tammy La Gorce. After reading her article from New Jersey Monthly, 'How News is the Future of Reporting in New Jersey', it made me want to click on a new window tab on my browser and google to see if my city had it's own hyperlocal web site.

'Hyperlocal' web sites have been popping up in cities across the U.S for a few years now; The New York Times' latest report on the trend was April of this year, and Gorce's article researched the site going back as far as 1997, from a community city web site in Maplewood, NJ.

The Real Reason Newspapers are dying?

Glad to see Columbia's got our backs here.

The Social Media Revolution

Is social media a fad? Or the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution?

Ann Arbor loses the News

On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area. 

The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.

But perhaps understandably (less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com--oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).