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.
