Reading Journal 10/8 (Lula)

My favorite news story I read this week was a feature on John Lennon and Yoko Ono by Scott James. It was penetrating, well structured and completely engaging. It discusses a “regular’ family that the couple stayed with on Second Avenue during the height of Lennon’s fame.

The writer never uses quotes from more than one person in the same paragraph, and his feature really showed me why this is important. By adhering to this rule, each quote is more “punchy” and effective, allowing the reader to focus on it and soak it up, rather than being drowned in a sea of different quotes. James also uses suspense in his article because he does not present the whole situation in the first paragraph. By doing this, the reader wants to keep going in order to find out more insider information about Lennon and Ono’s lives. Given the intriguing topic of the story, this technique works perfectly. This structure varies from a hard news story because it is not necessary to include the “who, what, when, where and why” in the first paragraph, allowing for more freedom since it is a feature. One example of the perfect use of a quote appeared in the following section:

“Lennon liked to joke with the girls and play his harmonica, and one day he shared a new tune. “He played it on our piano,” Barbara Hong said. “He said, ‘This is a song I’m going to release soon.’”

It was “Imagine.”

I got the chills after reading this section because of the way James broke up this paragraph and put the bit about “Imagine” in its own sentence. This contributes to the suspense and makes readers want to continue reading. James’ style is the opposite of bland, and I thoroughly enjoyed his use of journalistic techniques in this story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08bcjames.html?hp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg