The New York Times is probably the most famous newspaper company in the world. Their newspaper has such of wide variety of stories published daily. ] In the “N.Y. / Region” section of their website, one of the main stories discussing the region of New York City is the cleanliness of the city’s canals, particularly the Gowanus Canal at this time. The Gowanus Canal is a canal that has been polluted for a very long time, and is highly contaminated. The company responsible for not protecting the safety of the canal has violated rules, according to the article, “ As Cleanup Plan Is Set For Gowanus Canal, Violations Continue”.
Not only has the company in charge of the Gowanus Canal is in violation of rules, but the article, written by Kia Gregory, has violated some rules as well. Those rules of course are the nine principles and seven yardsticks of journalism that every journalist should know. Although there were a lot of positives and strongpoints about this article, there was a few negative and incorrect uses of certain things going on in Gregory’s article.
The way that the writer reported this article was done poorly at times. Gregory was up and down, left and right, and therefore was all over the place with her information. At one moment there is a key point at the beginning of the story. Next thing you know, another key fact is hinted towards the middle part of the story. And lastly, the conclusion that summed the article up and filled in all the holes where certain things were not stated at the time they should have been. A tip that Gregory should use is to try out the inverted pyramid method, which is all about writing the important information first and then the less but still important facts following those that are most important.
Gregory did not tell her story well enough in a would make a reader interested the entire length of the story. It was not intriguing enough. People probably won’t be talking about her story she published tomorrow because it is doubtful that they will even remember it. For example, when Gregory said that “The bulk of pollution was caused by long-closed factories and by decades of untreated sewage carried into the canal by city drains”, she waited until around the midsection of the article to state why the $500 million dollar cleanup plan is being put into action in the first place. The first thing she should be thinking before she writes her article is this: what does a journalist do to make their audience maintain interest throughout the entire story? And how can can a journalist make a story as interesting as possible? In other words, Gregory failed to make the important interesting. It just wasn’t significant enough for an audience to be attracted to it for that long of a time period.
The article as a whole was not too bad at all, as there were just a few blunders at all in the article. Yet there should not be errors and slip ups anyways, but then again, this is a media critique. Although this synopsis of Gregory's story may have been a little harsh throughout this article, the constructive criticism that was said benefits to whomever may read this blog.
Here is the link to Gregory’s article (it is two pages): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/nyregion/as-cleanup-plan-is-set-for-gowanus-canal-violations-continue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&
Jordan Gould
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