The story “Searching for Gary Smith” by Sarah Perry, gives a short look into the life and methods of Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith. As the story progresses you see a change from how Smith learns about his interviewee’s to learning about Smith. The story goes through Smith’s life and how he tries to understand himself but instead attempts to understand everything else that is going on around him. The story did a great job at this and made the reader feel as if they knew Smith and the people he interviewed as if they were an acquaintance of their own.

The lead for this story is an anecdotal lead. It starts off with Smith’s inner dialog while he is driving with Muhammad Ali on the Santa Monica freeway. The lead goes on to describe Smith watch Ali fall asleep at the wheel and then the brief dialog from Ali’s son when he took over the wheel to ensure that they didn’t crash.

I believe that the nut graph of this story is:

“But beneath Gary’s modesty and aw-shucks manner lies what people call one of the most penetrating minds in narrative nonfiction today. He uses poetry to delve into a young track star’s head, family history to understand a baseball owner, a psychological game to help a tennis legend understand himself, and a father’s vision to predict that a certain young golfer would flame out. “What kind of mind thinks like this?” wonders co-worker Rick Reilly in the introduction to Gary’s latest book Going Deep.”

I think that this is the nut graph of the story because before this the story just seems to be setting up a back story and giving information on Smith just in case you didn’t know who he was. This makes Smith seem more than just a writer and interviewer. It gives him an interesting dimension to his character that makes you want to find out more of just how this persons mind works. It also explains the two sides of this story. The unbelievable mind of a writer that is really able to dig deeper and get to the center of a story and a person. And a mind that is unable to figure himself out and is always thinking and planning so that nothing takes him by surprise.

I believe there is more to this story than just Smith’s interview techniques. I believe that it also poses the question of if Smith has ever been able to figure himself out as well as he figures out others. While he can understand those around him and their situations it seems as if Smith is not able to do the same for himself, and because of this makes it so that his life is methodically planned out so that he logic and some sort of understanding applied to his own life.

One example of a descriptive copy in this story is:

“Gary say on Agassi’s back porch once, the sizzle of a perfectly grilled steak popping in the background as he sipped a perfect mixture of peach raspberry margarita. Agassi wore shorts and a faded T-shirt, the hot Nevada sun beating down on his shoulders.”

The writer employs the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and sight to really put the reader on the back porch with Agassi and Smith. By giving such a detailed scene of what is going on the writer is able to really tell us what is going on and how his interviews aren’t normal interviews. But more like eating with a friends and talking about the good and bad in life.

Throughout the story there was a total of 6 sources used.

The “boring part” of the story is the time spent in Jesup, Georgia and the interactions with Duke. There really isn’t any real action or interesting things going on in this part of the story. It does provide a better look into Smith’s life and the kind of person he is though.

The end of the story is wonderful. It just doesn’t tie into the beginning of the story but to the story as a whole.

“Was the world’s heavyweight boxing champion pulling a rope-a-dope on the world’s heavyweight sportswriter? Was he resisting the famous mind drill? Gary, for once, will never know.”

The ending not only hints that Smith might have been beaten at his own game, but also still hints that Gary still doesn’t know everything about himself either.

I really enjoyed this story and learned about Gary Smith and what he does. Before reading this I had no clue as to who Gary Smith was. Not only did I learn about Smith but I also enjoyed the story and found it entertaining. One thing that I did not like about the story however was the lack of story into Smith’s life when he is not working. I think that would have provided a more rounded picture of Smith’s life.

For this week the news source I read was The LA Times. The first thing that I noticed about this site was that it was really similar to how the layout of the Washington Post. Another thing that I noticed right away was how many articles pertained to LA and California in general which was a large difference from the more politically concerned newspapers that I have been covering. While this makes sense since the LA Times is a city newspaper, I was stilled surprised by the lack of U.S. political stories that were being featured on the front page. That being said, the LA Times still does cover a wide array of topics such as Sports, World, Business, Entertainment etc.

One of the featured articles that caught my eye was “21-year-old man arrested in Dodger fan’s slaying, S.F. police say.” This caught my eye because I had heard about the stabbing the day before was surprised to see such a quick arrest in the matter. The article doesn’t go into much detail but does say that Michael Montgomery has been arrested for the slaying of Jonathan Denver in a night club after the Dodgers game Wednesday night. According to Police the stabbing occurred after some “back-and-forth” about the Giants and Dodgers which broke out into a physical fight. After the first fight, a second fight erupted and this is when the stabbing occurred.

Another article that interested me was “Appele’s iOS 7 launch was so massive it almost broke the Internet.” Last Wednesday apple rolled out their iOS7 update. On that day Blue Coat Systems based in Sunnyville saw traffic to Apple.com tripled, from 4% of total traffic, to 13%.  This huge increase of traffic was seen almost everywhere, with one customer saying that traffic to Apple.com spiked to 32%. By Monday Apple released a statement that 50% of all devices have upgraded to iOS7.

A third article that was interesting was “As GOP infighting persists, threat of government shutdown heightens.” Being one of the few political articles being featured I wanted to see how it was being covered. The article briefly covers the issue at hand and gives some detail as to what is going on. The federal government is facing a shutdown as the deadline for renewing funding for the federal government is approaching. President Obama keeps repeatedly telling the House that he will not negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. Speaker of the House John Boehner however says that this is not how government works. Also since the ACA (Affordable Care Act) passed House Republicans have been trying to delay or remove all-together ACA. Their latest attempt is pushing back the start of ACA by one year and also other debt bill legislation. Also despite the Senate desire to finish this quickly  Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) delayed the vote till Friday thru the means of pseudo-filibusterers. The last time the government shut down was in 1996, where national parks and museums throughout the country were closed.

This news outlet is definitely for residents of LA and to an extent most of California as well. Their main audience I think are people in their 20′s and up, who have more interest in what is happening locally rather than what is occurring throughout the nation. Many of the articles lacked depth and didn’t fully cover the story or provide sufficient background information, rather many seemed to assume prior knowledge of what was going on in the article. Because of this I found it difficult to get into any of the stories that were being covered because I was having to click on links that brought me to older news stories to fill me in as I was reading the one I was interested in. This really made it hard for me to like the LA Times and I would say that the LA times is not for me.

Grammar. I really don’t like grammar. I don’t even like the way it is spelled, because to me whenever anyone says it, it sounds like they are saying gramm-ER and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. The main gripe I have with grammar is how many rules, exceptions, formats etc. etc. there are in it. Like the “I” before “E” rule. How often is that actually right? Weirdly it seems never to be right. Another thing that makes grammar difficult to grasp for me is that I have no real understanding of how the English language is supposed to work, giving my feeble attempts to learn grammar nothing to stand on. Going off this I need to apologize to my elementary teachers because their attempts to teach me the Shurley Method have failed on epic proportions. For example, my solution to comma placement is putting them where it feels right. For me to really learn grammar I think that I would need to be put in some semester long or yearlong course that went through everything starting at the most basic level and continuously beat it into my head till I understood it.

For me getting your message across and making sure everyone understood what you meant is the most important thing. This is the only time I view grammar as necessary, or when you are in a business setting. Besides that, grammar is just something that is there to make you wrong in my opinion. For example, the difference between “Let’s eat grandma” and “Let’s eat, grandma” (where in the former you are suggesting to eat your grandmother) seems rather extreme and an abysmal failure of why grammar is necessary. Unless you are speaking with cannibals, are actually suggesting to eat your grandmother, or are in some other non-normal situation where societal standards of not eating people has vanished, I think that the message is rather clear that you want to eat and are telling your grandmother so.

I have trouble using correct grammar, let alone recognizing correct grammar. So my only pet peeve about grammar usage is when people fail to use the correct form of “there/their/they’re” “your/you’re” etc. because it is so incredible simple and easy to remember. Another thing I don’t like is when people write emails and texts using shorthand like “2″, “u”,”ur”,”b” etc. Spell out the stupid word. It’s less than 5 characters long. Acronyms however, are fine, like ASAP (as soon as possible). Other than that, I wish grammar would just leave me alone.

Caleb Jones, Andrew Hutte and I decided to choose Consumer Electronics as our topic for the group project. We decided on consumer electronics because we believed that throughout the semester their would be an almost constant stream of news for us to follow. Already Apple has released their new line of iPhones and in November both Microsoft and Sony will be releasing their next gen gaming consoles. Along with that their always seems to be something new coming out or being worked on as well, such as smart watches that are being developed by different companies already. I hope to learn more about consumer patterns and perception of technology from doing this group project. Hopefully by the end of it I will also know more about current tech and what is supposed to come out in the future so I can make more informed decisions about what I buy.

Personally I really do not like doing public speaking and am a reserved person in general. This definitely applied to walking up to random people and doing first person interviews. At first it was really awkward for me but as it went on ot became easier and easier to do. Also many people would cut the interview short after hearing the question and thinking that they had nothing to say on the topic, which made it difficult to find people as well. Also many people didn’t want to be recorded and would walk off after I said I would be recording them. Even more people however didn’t want their picture taken.

For these interviews I asked:

“What is your opinion on iOS7?”

These are the answers that I got.

Matt Cranor:

“It’s a lot brighter, it’s mostly a lot brighter than the last OS. I like all the little quality of life fixes that they did to make it easier to use. However, I think that if they sped up the app opening and closing animations it would go a lot smoother.”

Chris Boise:

“While I don’t have it yet, I’ve heard mixed reviews. I’ve heard that it’s really awesome especially with the new iTunes Radio. I’ve also heard that their is some slow down  with some of the older phone models, not necessarily with the 5. So I’ve heard a little bit of both sides. I’ve heard that its really good and makes a lot of updates. I’ve heard some people say that it looks like Windows revamped.

I think that it looks like Android as well, and at some point both Windows and iOS will look the same”

Genna Ainsworth:

“It looks like Android. And they way they did it just doesn’t look good to me. I think it makes it look cheap”

Hannah Roberts:

“I have it on my iPhone and my iPad and I really like it. Especially iTunes radio and the way it looks.”

Brandon Mattingly:

“I have no opinion of it yet. I typically buy a lot of Apple products, but I haven’t had time to peruse it yet so, I’m the type that if I actually don’t have any knowledge of it I don’t form an opinion of it”

Billy Kretschner

“It looks a lot like Android to me. And I want to know what was the point of making it look like Android.”

Brittany Brown

“I think it’s a little too similar to the look of windows 8. And the importance and cultural relevance of it says something about our society.”

Today I read an article from the Lariat online. The article was “Bryce Petty believes Baylor can win Big 12″ and talked about how Bryce Petty believes Baylor can win the Big 12 through teamwork and perfecting their game. Throughout this Petty was quoted numerous times. I believe that all these quotes really added to the story and made what Petty believes credible. One quote was:

“It’s fun to see your name on that type of thing, but really it just goes back to this team,” Petty said. It’s all pointed back to them. If you go back and look at film, I really haven’t done anything. It’s been Tevin [Reese]. It’s been A.G. [Antwan Goodley]. It’s been those guys out front. It’s been Lache [Seastrunk]. You know I think the Heisman is a great deal, but it’s really a team effort to get you there.”

This quote was in reference to Petty being tied in 9th place for Heisman already on HeismanPundit. By giving credit entirely to the team it really adds to Petty’s character and shows that he is playing for the team instead of himself. By quoting Petty it also becomes very clear what his goals and aspirations are.

“Really, just a Big 12 championship, that’s what I want to do,”

Good quotes make it so that there is no misunderstanding in what a person thinks or wants to do. Throughout this article quotes like that are used.

While quotes provide depth to an article I would not want to be quoted in a newspaper. I have had many of my friends either be misquoted or have their quotes edited to fit the agenda of the author or the article and I do not want this to happen to me. Unless I could review my quote to ensure it was what I said and not out of context I am fine never being quoted in a newspaper.

For this week’s regular media blog post I reviewed the Huffington Post. Created in 2005 as a left/liberal alternative to news sites such as The Drudge the Huffington Post is very different than both The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Huffington Post deliveries it’s news in more of a blog style rather than list all the stories that pertain to a section. This also leads me to believe that the Huffington Post is geared more to a younger audience because it resembles a social media site rather than a physical newspaper, which many younger people tend to not use as their news source.  Also with sections such as Weird, Celebrity, and Horoscope it seems that the Huffington Post is trying to capture the younger generation of readers who aren’t yet concerned with political and business stories.

One of the front page stories was “House Votes To Cut Food Stamps By $40 Billion”. The link to this story was Speaker of the House John Boehner holding his over-sized gavel with the title EAT THIS over it. This just emphasizes why i believe that the Huffington Post appeals to a younger audience. The article details the cuts to the nation’s food stamp program that the House passed earlier today. The House aims to limit the amount of food stamps given out and to make getting food stamps harder to do. The main component that is different in the bill the House passed is that recipients of food stamps must be in search of a job or attending training to qualify for a job, allow states to require drug tests,  and deny able-bodied adults. While this bill aims to cut $4 billion a year and $40 billion in total, it also will deny benefits to millions of Americans starting in 2014.

Another article that I found interesting was “Jay Carney Says John Boehner Has ‘Putin Envy’”. This article covers a YouTube video that John Boehner uploaded. This video covers what Boehner’s sees as Obama’s unwillingness to talk with the American Speaker of the House or Republicans of the House on the matter of raising the debt ceiling, but will talk with Russia on Syria. In response to this video White House press secretary Jay Carney stated that Boehner is experiencing “Putin Envy”. The article also mentions the House’s plan to push a plan that offers a one-year debt ceiling hike, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, tax reform, and a one-year delay of Obamacare.

The Huffington Post also had an article about Tesla. The article, entitled “Tesla Is Working On Self-Driving Cars”, talks about how Tesla is joining the race against Google and other companies to be the first to build a self driving car. Tesla hopes to have a car that handles 90% of the driving out in three years, however most analysts say that it’ll be closer to 10-15 years before we see anything that sophisticated. Tesla is not the only of companies that plans to build a self driving car. Google, Mercedes, Daimler AG, and Nissan also have cars with driver-less features or are building self-driving cars.

The Huffington Post is a great source of news for those under 30 or those who are less interested in serious politics but more lighthearted discussion of politics. The Huffington Post while an interesting and more up-to-date (style wise) news source does not appeal to me as much as The New York Times or The Washington Post because many of the articles I found interesting, I also found to be to short and lacking background detail or detail into the subject.

Today in the Dallas Daily News there was an article on the new iPhones tells the reader about the new models. The article found here followed many of the writing rules we are learning about in class.

“You’re no longer limited to only black or white for you iPhone color. Now, you can choose green, yellow, red, white and blue. This fits well with the more colorful iOS 7. ”

These sentences came from the paragraph describing the new iPhone 5C. These sentences also represent the length of many of  the sentences throughout the article. This coincides with the 1st rule of good writing: Good writing uses short sentences.

Another rule that this article followed well is the 4th rule: Good writing clears away redundancy, jargon and institutional language.

“The iPhone 5S is ”up to twice as fast” and has twice the graphical power of its predecessor. According to liveblogs, they said that this is 56 times as fast as the original iPhone, which I’ve gotta say, that’s pretty impressive. ”

Instead of saying that the iPhone 5S has an upgraded quad-core SGX544MP4 GPU,the writer of the article took out the technical jargon that many readers would not understand and put it in layman’s terms.

Rule number 5: Good writing comes to the point quickly.

There are many instances throughout the article that demonstrate this rule. One of these examples is regarding the price of the iPhone 5C on contract.

“It will be available with a 2-year contract for for $99 for 16GB and $199 for 32GB.”

Lastly another rule that this article exhibits is the 7th rule: Good writing has short paragraphs.

“They’re focusing on making the camera even better than it already is, too. “It used to be that to take better pics, you just learned to become a better photographer.” (That’s still true, Apple. Trust me. OurDallas Morning News photographers are a lot better than me no matter what camera each of us is using.) Apple claims the 5S camera is “SLR level.” and has a new type of flash called True Tone Flash. There is also a burst mode if you hold down the shutter button, which takes up to 10 frames per second. ”This is great for action shots and fidgeting kids,” Apple said. Fair enough.”

This was the longest paragraph throughout the entire article. It was six sentences long and contained a tidbit from the author as well.  All the other paragraphs throughout the article were five sentences or less.

Writing leads for news stories was a new experience for me and one that was harder than expected. Because I tend to get most of my news from Twitter I was finding myself writing the leads in more of a “Headliny” fashion instead of complete sentences. However after writing a few leads it got easier to do. The stories that continued more news then other stories were harder than other leads to write. Trying to decide what was the most important elements of the story and what was the news was something I found harder then I thought it would be.

After writing all of my leads I began to realize that almost every  prominent story had all of the important information within the first 4 paragraphs. This just confirmed my suspicions that you do not need to read the entire article to know everything that is going on in the story. It also shows that almost every story is written with the inverted pyramid style.

The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper first published and circulated in Washington, D.C. in 1877. Having been around since then makes, The Washington Post Washington D.C.’s oldest circulating newspaper. While The Washington Post covers a diverse range of topics from national and international news, business, politics, pop culture, fine arts, film, fashion and sports, it has distinguished itself from other leading newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times though its political reporting on the workings of U.S. government, most notable their coverage of the Watergate Scandal. Since The Washington Post does tend to cover more political matters, I believe that their main audience are educated adults and to a lesser existence university students in America.

One of today’s (9/11/2013) top headlines covers Syria and is entitled Obama takes Syria case to the public in White House address. Following Russia’s proposed diplomatic solution of having President Bashar al-Assad give up Syria’s chemical weapons to international forces, President Obama has stated that this is the last diplomatic solution for Syria to avoid an American military strike. President Obama also put Congress’ vote on military action is Syria on freeze, waiting till President Bashar al-Assad gives notification on his intent to give up Syria’s chemical weapons to Russia. Despite President Obama’s turn to diplomatic solutions, he is still talking about the need for America to strike in case Syria fails to cooperate. However, Congress still stands divided on taking military action in Syria with many stating that President Obama has not done a good enough job of convincing Americans of the need to take action.

Obama takes Syria case to the public in White House address

Another article that I found interesting was Apple’s new iPhones: How the 5S and 5C stack up against the competition. On September 10th, Apple unveiled its two latest iPhone models, the 5C and the 5S. The 5C is essentially a cheaper version of the iPhone 5, except with slightly better specs and is made of plastic. The 5S is the top line model, boasting increased processing power, new flash technology that will give pictures “SLR-quality”, and a fingerprint scanner. The iPhone isn’t the only smart phone around anymore though. The 5C will mainly face competition from Google’s Moto X phone, that boast total customization over the phone, a larger screen, and a higher megapixel camera. However the 5C is cheaper, smaller, slimmer, and offers a better resolution than the Moto X. The competition for the iPhone 5S is the Samsung Galaxy S4. Like the 5C, the 5S will have a smaller screen and fewer megapixels then the Galaxy S4. However, the 5S will have a more premium feel since it is designed out of aluminum and glass, compared to plastic for the Galaxy S4, a higher resolution, and a fingerprint scanner to boast over the Galaxy S4. There are still many other smartphones in the market, but these are the ones expected to compete with Apple’s new line of iPhones.

Apple’s new iPhones: How the 5S and 5C stack up against the competition

Their article on Shelf-harm blogs also caught my attention. Self-harm blogs pose problems and opportunities are blogs solely dedicated to self cutting, suicide, eating disorders etc. and come with all the details and photos that go along with such activities. This community of self-harm bloggers according to one user, Anouschka, is understanding of the actions and doesn’t judge those who self-harm, which according to Anouschka is a welcome feeling often lacking in her real life interactions. Experts however say that the bonds that self-harm bloggers form reinforce the actions that they are taking and may convince them that self-harm is a healthy and normal thing to do. Another concern is the spreading of misinformation on how to self-harm among the bloggers. Also these types of blogs present trouble for recovering self-harmers and may trigger relapses for them according to Shannon Barnett, a pediatric psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. These fears led Tumblr and many other blogging network’s to ban self-harm blogs, but this ban does not seem to be working as self-harm blogs are still around.

Self-harm blogs pose problems and opportunities

The Washington Post is one newspaper that I will always try to grab if I can. This is because of the vast range of articles that are covered in The Washington Post and I find many of them to e fairly interesting. Also the political coverage that they do often brings different facts/statements and viewpoints on stores than other newspapers tend to.