Pulled Quotes

A Reuters story described a “bizarre accident” where an eagle ray jumped into a boat and killed a woman off the coast of the Florida Keys. The article doesn’t follow the inverted pyramid style and the information in the lead could have been arranged more appropriately. Firstly, the where and when should have been reserved for the end of the sentence. The lead has the where and when placed in the middle right before you find out that the woman was stabbed, which is cumbersome and unimportant in relation to the fact that the woman is now dead.

Secondly, the thoroughness of research doesn’t do the story any justice as the reporter only has two sources, one of which is another media outlet, and the source she does have seems to still be grappling with the information himself. He uses vague phrases that doesn’t illicit any clear explanation of how the woman died. There’s no mention of the family in the story, which would have been beneficial to the story since they were the ones on the boat when the woman died. The reporter, apparently, thought a valid replacement of that information would be fun facts about the eagle ray that she wrestled together from the Florida Museum of Natural History website. That kind of seems like the bare minimum effort.

Finally, the reporter decided, whether it has any relevance or not, to mention that the famous Steve Irwin, self-appointed Crocodile Hunter met a similar end when he was stabbed through the heart by a ray’s barb. I guess relating someone, who has yet to be named in the article, to a celebrity is news worthy information as people immediately relate death by stingray to the charismatic Crocodile Hunter.

Overall there’s a lot of questions that went unanswered.

The journalist covering the story “Power surge leaves Las Vegas Strip in the dark” on msnbc.com was very clear and concise with his information. Right away I knew what the most newsworthy information was because it was in the lead, and it was very clear: “The power has returned to four Las Vegas Strip casino resorts.” However, the lead doesn’t answer the 5 W’s and the article talks mostly about what occurred with the power surge, so it almost seems as if the writer isn’t sure which is more newsworthy, the fact that all is well again in terms of power or the fact that there was a power surge on the strip to begin with.

The journalist explains in the second sentence/paragraph that a blown transformer caused the outage, resulting in people being trapped in elevators for hours. This additional information clears up the questions remaining after reading the first sentence,. The journalist then gets progressively into more detailed and specific information, in inverted pyramid style, as he gets closer to the end of the story. He mentions the exact names of the “casino resorts” (as he initially refers to them) and says what day and time the transformer blew. He gets this information from a fire department source, which makes the writing more trustworthy and credible.

This was a good, concise, to-the-point article, and I felt as if all the important information was delivered, although it wasn’t exactly clear what the news was from the lead.