What Works Assignment 7

Headline: Cirque du Soleil aerialist who plunged to his death was trying new act for the first time

My dad actually sent me this story because we go to Cirque du Soleil shows almost every summer together. Even though my dad sends me a lot of news articles throughout the week, I clicked on this one first because I always wonder how more of the performers don’t get hurt (or in this case die) when they do such crazy acts.

This story uses a hard news lead because it directly spells out the who, what, where, when and why. The nutgraph comes quickly following the lead in the third paragraph where it talks about the fact this this was a new act that acrobat Yann Arnaud was doing in the show.

There were five sources used throughout the story, although only two direct quotes from these sources. This story cited the original story published by the Tampa Bay Times, the Instagram account from the man involved in the accident, the Cirque du Soleil Twitter page (although no direct quote was used from it), Tampa police (again no direct quote from them) and lastly Daniel Lamarre, president of Cirque du Soleil.

This article also did some research into past deaths that occurred within the Cirque du Soleil group. It talked about the other two deaths, occurring in 2016 and 2013, and outside researched was definitely involved in that.

This article embeds a variety of links throughout the story, which were helpful to my in the story-telling process because they allowed me to see the original article that had been written as well as stories about the other two members of Cirque du Soleil who had died in the past. Some of the links though were back to other stories that Fox News had written on the subject, which was a little iffy for me. It felt as though they were trying to get readers to read the same exact story twice. At the top of the article, there’s a short video to watch. Although it doesn’t add much new information, the videos played showing Arnaud practicing and performing on the aerial straps, which allowed me to visualize what he was doing much better.

I think a way the author could’ve added value to the story was perhaps going deeper into the training and preparation of the members of Cirque du Soleil. If I knew nothing about Cirque du Soleil, this story makes it seem like he practiced this act a few times before trying it out. In reality, though, he was probably practicing for months.