What Works Assignment 11

Headline: Saving Our World

I came across this story on Twitter as I was scrolling through my timeline. Someone had tagged the story and said “This is a beautiful piece of journalism” so I clicked on it.

This isn’t a traditional news story that has an inverted pyramid set up. It focuses more on pictures to draw you into the story. It forces you to click on pictures to read more on the story.

The “lead” here is a more of a delayed lead. It’s just two simple statements that pull the reader in. Then the writer makes the reader think about what greenhouse gases have been doing to the environment and informs the reader that it’s too late to reverse the damage one and wonder what will happen next, forcing the reader to wonder how their life will have to change to adapt to these environmental challenges.

I think each picture highlighted makes the reader wonder the story behind each picture and thus click on it to get the full story. I think this was necessary to make the article successful, otherwise people would’ve stopped reading if the picture wasn’t enticing.

Each picture also has a caption that tells the reader more about the story. Honestly, some of these were more interesting to me than others so I wouldn’t probably have read all of them if I didn’t have to for the what works assignment. The cover pictures, as well as the pictures within each article, were hands down the most effective multimedia elements in helping to tell the story. Without the pictures, I think the story would’ve fallen flat and wouldn’t have done as good of a job as portraying the effects that are happening on the environment. It’s easy to talk about

This story had a wide variety of sources. Each individual story has two-three sources, most of whom are officials who are pros on the topic being discussed. I think this is what makes the story so credible and “beautiful” as the person on Twitter put it. Since this is more of a feature story, they were able to use a bunch of time to get it right, which adds credibility and respect to the whole piece.

The only negative thing I can see in this, is that some of the stories are long, and I lost interest quickly. I think that’s partly because I have a poor attention span and sadly, this isn’t something that I know too much about so some of the terms went right over my head. For someone who was really passionate about this though, it would be great!