The Times 3/9-3/13

Monday:
One article that caught my eye was the one about health care in Romania. This story took two issues that seem to be on everyone’s minds—healthcare and money—and combined them in one story. I think this is a great idea for any story: if one issue makes a story interesting, think of how much more interesting it could be with two issues!
A story that is an example of a national story written with a local angle is the one about college tuition in Rhode Island. This story gives a new/different outlook on the immigration issue because it focuses on students at a local school.
Another article that I thought was interesting was the one about corruption in China. It was interesting to see the human interest side of the story while still gaining a legal and cultural perspective.

Tuesday:
One article that caught my attention and then lost it was the one about the voting law. This article caught my attention just because I usually am interested in justice and court related stories.
However, the story was written in a confusing way, confusing enough to make me not want to finish reading it. Since the authors didn’t do a good job of explaining the issue, I got frustrated enough to stop reading.
I thought that the story on the killings in Africa was written very well. This story looked at something you read about occasionally but found a completely new angle on it. It was very unusual to read that the killings could actually make a country more stable than it was before. I appreciated this story because it was able to take something familiar and make it new.

Wednesday:
A story today that did a good job of taking a big issue and humanizing it was the story about people who need to live in motels because of the hard economic times. I think that everyone is so tired of hearing about bad economics that people who want to write about that need to find some new way to present it. This article did just that. It told you the story of a family who was kicked out of their home because of the economic time, and then you wanted to read more about that because you wanted to find out more about the family.
However, this wasn’t the only story that related economics to something else, so maybe it’s just that everything is related to economics these days.
Even the article about stem cell research combined the story with money issues. since most stories have a strong financial aspect to them, many authors seem to be taking that rout because they know that people are thinking about it and therefore will be interested in their stories.

Thursday:
Today there was a story about whether or not print newspapers will cease to exist. It is always interesting to read newspaper stories about papers, so this story caught my eye.
Today’s paper also continued this week’s trend of talking about China. This story talked about yet another way that the Chinese are resisting their government, which is very interesting to see. I don’t know why the paper decided to run a bunch of stories on China this week, but I think it is an effective tactic: if you get people to start thinking about something, and then run a bunch of different stories that are somehow related to that topic, you will probably get more people to read your stories.
Today there was yet another story that used economics as a starting point. This story was discussing home makeovers and organizing, and yet it added in the issue of finances. This goes along with what a lot of stories were doing earlier this week, where they take a couple issues and find a way to discuss both in order to make your story more interesting. I think that most of these stories did a really good job of that.