Jennifer Noel

Whale Vomit

Since we’ve been talking about newsworthy and un-newsworthy articles, I decided to use this article I found on whale vomit, (yes whale vomit), to question further if more often then not, news can be considered newsworthy. As I’m looking through my YAHOO! homepage, I’m was finding it very hard to pick an article that didn’t suck.

As we’ve discussed before, news should be intriguing. It should make you want to read more about the article from just the first few sentences. However, when I started to read this article, I couldn’t help but keep asking myself, “Why the hell am I reading about whale vomit!?” So to begin, this news article has a bad attention getter.

Other than the fact that I was purposely looking for an article that was bad enough to earn the title ‘un-newsworthy,’ I would never normally read something that takes until almost the end to get to the point of why this particular whale vomit is so important. Which brings me to point two. People like detail, but if it takes until the middle of a pointless subject to get to the ‘good stuff,’ then its already a crappy news release. Many people get bored easily, so you can’t lose them before you get to the point.

Finally, I could not have been more disappointed with the ending. The kid could get almost $300,000 for this piece of vomit and what is he going to do with it?- Buy a house for animals. Now, please don’t get me wrong, I LOVE animals. However, when your 8-years old, the fate of that much money should not be put in your hands. Why would the parents not put this in savings, or something like, a charity that feeds hungry people. We have lots of hungry people! In short, this is not a newsworthy article. Bad beginning, slow to get exciting and bombed the ending.

Jen