Article Analysis (Wk 5)

The article I analyzed for this week can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/world/europe/09iceland.html?em

This article focuses on the financial crisis that recently occurred in Iceland, and is not a hard news story because it centers on the effects of the crisis rather than the straight facts of the crisis itself.

I found this article to be very effective primarily because of the way it began.  It began narratively, which I thought was very different and risky for a story like this but ultimately more compelling to read.  In a story that could easily be just about numbers, the author gave the audience a reason to care about what was happening in a remote country that most of us have no connection to.

Since the article is not written as a typical hard news story, the lede and nut graph are not immediately found in the first or second paragraph.  Instead, the lede is in the third paragraph:

"It is not as if Reykjavik, where about two-thirds of the country’s 300,000 people live, is filled with bread lines or homeless shanties or looters smashing store windows. But this city, until recently the center of one of the world’s fastest economic booms, is now the unhappy site of one of its great crashes. It is impossible to meet anyone here who has not been profoundly affected by the financial crisis."

The nut graph can be found in the following paragraph, providing the exact figures that illustrate the country's economic decline.

Overall, the story follows the Wall Street Journal formula, beginning with an anecdotal or soft news lead and eventually progressing into the hard news.

The article ends on a quote kicker, which  I found to be effective because it illustrates the impact of the financial crisis on the people, which is really what the story is about.