Cody is a Blog

What I'll be referencing is here.

The entry begins by painting scenery to give the reader a vivid idea of how to view the scenario; after all, how is a person in a white Minneapolis culture supposed to be able to see through the eyes of a culture that they've never experienced unless it's explicitly laid out for them?

The story itself, which is about Mexican-Americans in high school, details a specific experience that should offend them and talks to them about how they feel about being oppressed in our culture. It does this through interviews and observations; the reporter describes what's around her and puts in quotes that tell the reader what exactly is going on and exactly how they feel.

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The article that I will be referencing is here.

The numbers that are used in the story are used very well; they're not overwhelming, but they paint an accurate picture of what makes the story newsworthy in the first place.

For example, take a look at this paragraph:

Congress is acting after a United Nations panel estimated that emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by 50% to 85% below 2000 levels by 2050 in order to avoid severe damage to the environment. A cap-and-trade system is widely seen as the most politically feasible approach, although economists say that taxing emissions such as carbon-dioxide would be simpler and leave less room for loopholes.

It's fairly obvious what's going on. Congress wants the U.S. to reduce their CO2 levels to 85% of their levels in the year 2000 by the year 2050 so that there's no more long-term effects on the environment. It's fairly obvious what the numbers are for, and they fill their purpose better than any other number could possibly do in that situation.

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The article that I will be referencing is here.

The obituary is a pretty standard one (in terms of obituary form -- especially because this was found on the NY Times website), starting with the person's name, their largest accomplishment, and how old they were in the lead.
The next paragraph, which described how the person died, was attributed to Mazel's sister.

Everything's standard about the obituary, but not too much is actually attributed because all of the reported information is standard fact that is easy to look up.

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The article that I will be referencing is here.

Mostly the article builds up excitement for the event because of circumstances that have occurred in the baseball series before this game. For example, in Game 6, J.D. Drew had a career night, where he had a wonderful game. The article uses quotes from players and people there to harness the excitement of the deciding game seven.

Otherwise, the article manly uses statistics and figures to highlight the importance of the game and detail why I should care. "Although the Red Sox are trying to become just the 11th of 66 teams to win a seven-game series after facing a 3-1 deficit, they pulled off an even more impressive comeback in the 2004 ALCS against the New York Yankees, winning four consecutive games after losing the first three - the only time that has happened in major league history," the story states, nothing that I could be witnessing history by watching this game.

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The press release that I will be referencing is here.

The press release is different from the regular news story in that it's straight hard news with no real context put into it. It looks much like a combination of a police report and a written news article. People are listed instead of written into the story, and only descriptions of the event itself -- meaning that there is much less detail and context in the press release than there was in the actual story.

Also absent are attributions and quotations.

Posted by Cody Zwiefelhofer at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The two entries that I will be referencing are here and here.

The two articles are from different websites, but they're very similar to an initial story and a follow-up report.

The first story (chronologically, the second one listed on this blog entry) simply tells what happened: At least five students are dead after a sheriff's officer went on a shooting spree at a house party in the city of Crandon. The second story (chronologically) has many more details that weren't available in the original report. For example, the names of the people who died, the fact that exactly 6 have been killed, and the exact time it happened. Most of these details came after a press conference on the shootings, those of which included that the officer that went on the shooting spree was not on active duty, which felt like it was implied in the original story.

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For this entry, I will be looking at this article.

The story begins with a nice, summarizing lead and adds a couple of "fact blocks" that were conceptualized in class earlier this week. Afterwards, the story begins to reconstruct the scene of the bike ride that required the use of some knowledge in those fact blocks earlier in the story. For example, the story set forth that there was a meeting between the bikers and the police that led to a more peacefully-oriented bike ride this time around. For the rest of the story, this information is the groundwork for the rest of the information of the story; in other words, most of the news that comes on later in the story is based off of the information that was grounded in "fact blocks" earlier in the article. The reader needed to know that framework so that the reporter could set up a chronological review of the events during the bike ride.

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This is the article that I will be referencing.

There are many sources used here, not all of the same validity or purpose. Some of the sources -- Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad and presidential spokesman Rashid Qureshi -- are used to expand insight into what's going on in the minds of the Pakistani government in regards to the video that Osama Bin Laden released on Thursday that urged rebellions against the Pakistani government.

Another source, Talat Masood, is used to get insight into the head of Osama Bin Laden. He has the credentials to do this, because he is a retired army general, and army generals generally have much more insights into the state of mind in a war-like situation (especially this one in the Middle East -- Masood is a retired Pakistani army general) than the average citizen.

Also used was Shakil Abbasi, a simple office receptionist. The insight that an office receptionist would be able to provide is questionable, but in this case, it's appropriate, as it's important for the average citizen to get a little bit of insight as to what the general population of the citizens in the afflicted area think about the video. Earlier in the story, all that the reader is treated to is political jargon from the head spokespeople. When they interview a receptionist, the reader is instead presented with a source that they can relate to instead of the big bosses of the governmental world.

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This is the lead that I'll be referencing.

"A federal judge in Vermont gave the first legal endorsement yesterday to rules in California, being copied in 13 other states, that intend to reduce greenhouse gases emitted by automobiles and light trucks."

The lead is entirely factual; everything is covered in the first sentence. Who? California and 13 other states. What? Those 14 states are allowed to have greenhouse gas emission standards for automobiles and light trucks. Where? Well, once again, California and 13 other states. When? Although it says "yesterday" on the website, right under the headline, it says that the story was published on September 13, 2007.

It tells me everything that I want to know about the story without actually telling me everything that I want to know. In other words, it gives me enough background information to tell me what I should expect when reading the story; however, it doesn't tell me everything that went on. Later in the story, I read about many other vital details that give me a full understanding of the story. A few examples of information that isn't important enough to be in the first sentence, but still important enough to be placed in the story:

"The ruling follows a decision by the United States Supreme Court in April that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide as air pollutants. The ruling in Vermont explicitly endorses the idea that California has the right to set its own regulations on the gases, and that other states, like Vermont, have the right to follow its lead."

"In 2002, California adopted the first state law requiring auto manufacturers to begin reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. In 2004, it set standards for emission reductions.

Automakers sued to block the standards in Vermont and California. The Vermont lawsuit led to a trial in May and Judge Sessions’s ruling on Wednesday; the California case is pending."

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