Reading Journal 10/1

As I trekked around numerous publications this week looking for interesting articles, I came across some good material. An article that particularly caught my eye was called “Subway train strikes, kills man in lower Manhattan” found in the New York Post. The article was about 20 year old Brian Freely, a mugger who jumped in front of a moving subway car in order to avoid police. What initially caught my eye was the lead… “A punk who robbed a victim at knifepoint and fled into a downtown Manhattan subway was killed early today when he tried to leap onto a passing train and was struck, authorities said.” I thought it was very odd that the author referred to Freely as a “punk”. Although it was probably true, it seems like an inappropriate word choice for someone who had just passed away. Nonetheless, I think this is a good example of how language is used to draw your reader in. By using this abnormal word, it made me want to read the rest of the article. Another thing that I noticed was the piece was only about ten sentences, so it was very short and simple. The author had no angle and no details, it was just cut and dry reporting.

As I continued my observations on ledes I drew my attention to an article published in the New York Times called “For Female Marines, Tea Comes With Bullets” by Elisabeth Bumiller. The piece is about a gun skirmish in the Afghani combat zone, however the lede states “MARJA, Afghanistan — They expected tea, not firefights”. Although the article mentions the female soldiers drinking tea with Pashtun natives, that fragment of information was not the gist of the article. That’s why I was curious as to why that was chosen as lede-worthy. I think this is just another example of how journalists need to use multiple techniques to draw in their readers, one of these being wit and humor. It interests me to compare the work we have been doing in class to some of the pieces that I read in publications. Methods such as the inverted pyramid and the traditional lede are always a foolproof way to write an article, however, it seems that these procedures can be tweaked every once in a blue moon.