Article Analysis (Wk 6)

The article I'm analyzing can be found here:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/11/09/haiti.school.collapse/index.html

This story is about relatives and volunteers frantically searching for children after the collapse of a school in Haiti.  It's a pretty standard hard news story -- the lede is the first sentence, and the nut graph immediately follows the lede,

The lede reads:

"Frantic relatives of people believed trapped in the rubble of a collapsed school picked at the ruins with shovels and hammers Sunday before being pushed back by police amid new safety concerns."

The nut graph describes the setting of the accident, who is attempting to help, and what these people are trying to do.  The story unfolds in typical inverted pyramid fashion, beginning with the facts and progressing with the background story and quotations about the event.

The story ends on an "out of gas" kicker.  The author finishes the story with facts that he still needed to include but had no room for, and there is no connection between the final sentence and the rest of the story.

I thought that this story was effective in that it presented the news clearly and accurately, but I thought that there could have been more quotations in the story and that the author could have begun the story anecdotally and then continued with the facts.  Because it was immediately presented as strictly hard news, there was virtually no connection with the audience about a topic that was very sensitive. The only quotation that the article got from the President of Haiti was that the structure of the school was "really weak." 

In my opinion, more carefully picked quotations and a more sensitive, anecdotal approach would have made this story more effective and captivating.