Blog Number Two

Complete your second blog. Be sure to read writing good leads and bad leads in your Working with Words book. From there, read the Columbian or Oregonian. Identify one well-written lead and one porrly written lead. Provide each lead you are critiquing through a link to the story or re-type the lead in the text box for your blog. Be sure that when you critique the lead you provide sound reasoning for your opinions.

I found my example of a good lead in Friday's Columbian. The lead was as follows:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi defended his transportation plan Thursday, saying he’s confident he could divert $10 billion in state general fund revenue to pay for congestion-relieving transportation projects without borrowing from education or programs for vulnerable people.

In my opinion, this is a very good lead. I is not too long and it covers all the major details. The "Who" in this lead in Dino Rossi. The "What" is him defending his plan. The "When" was Thursday. Those are the essentials in a good lead, according to Working with Words. It says "Many journalists prefer to think of the basic formula for the hard-news leads as who. what. time , day or date, and place. Because this really wasn't an event, there is now place.

One bad lead I found was also in Fiday's Columbian in the Clakr County section. It was a follows:

Connor Simons took his normal seat Tuesday when his eighth-grade Wy’east Middle School classmates began the WASL exam.

But instead of the reading portion of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, he cracked open the teen-angst novel, “Catcher in the Rye.”

This lead is more of telling a story than giving me information about the even that went on at Wy'east. Further along in the story, one finds out that the students had an organized protest against the WASL. This lead is good for a interesting, but all the facts need to be presented early on in the lead.

Blog Number One

Find one story in either the Oregonian or the Columbian. Identify why the story is newsworthy using the qualities of news. Be sure to include some vital information:
1. the date the story ran
2. which newspaper the story ran in
3. which section of the newspaper (the A section, Metro section, etc.)


The story that I felt was newsworthy was in the Columbian on Friday the 18th on the front page. The story was entitled Benedict prays with abuse victims. The story is newsworthy for many reasons. One of them is that it is timely. This is the only time that Pope Benedict has visited the United States and it is happening now. This story has to do with the people around here because the Pope is one of the most recognizable figures in the world and there is a lot of Catholics in the area and he is on American soil.