Archive for February 8th, 2008
Superbowl shooting almost happened
Every time I write a blog for this class, I try to find a random article with the most engaging and concise information. After all, a journalist’s job is to hook the reader and lay out the facts, right? So as I scoured different online news sources, the article, “Man planned Superbowl gunfire, feds say,” caught my attention and was, I thought, a great example of proper journalistic writing.
Within the first sentence, the article covers the who, what, where, when, why, and how, and the rest of this concise story even includes a quote from Kurt William Havelock’s father and gives readers some background about why Havelock was willing to “shed the blood of the innocent” as he stated in his manifesto.
As it turns out, he was denied a liquor license for the bar he wanted to open in Tempe, Arizona, which was going to be (try not to laugh) Halloween-themed. The bar was either going to be called The Haunted Castle or Drunkensteins. Finding out this bit of information definitely bumped the stories likeability up a notch for me. Not only was this story journalistic, but it managed to adequately entertain.
We’ll never know if Havelock would have really gone through with firing off 200 rounds of ammunition, and this story isn’t big enough to have had any real news coverage, but the article is a great read with all the important facts and even some humor.
