The College Perspective by Lindsey

The stories chosen primarily focused on Vermont’s ruling to change Columbus Day this year to Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In the print story, the lead accurately explains the situation, but is slightly lengthy because the author chose to include a quote right away. In the video coverage, it cut off the introduction by a news reporter, as they expected you to know what they were talking about, and led with a random civilian being interviewed about the impact of the name change. The reporter’s lead was slightly confusing, it takes until around the twenty second mark to understand the focus of the video, even though it was only a little over a minute long video.

In terms of length and content, the video focused mainly on what residents as well as officials were saying about the change, while the print focused on only the governor’s statements and past historical facts about the holiday. The length of both was relatively short and to the point. The video had two citizens, a woman and a man, who had alternating views on the topic, as well as several different official’s opinions, while the print only had quotes from the governor.

While the print article had less variety of attribution, it served its purpose for the story. The video had a variety of people talking and the reporter did a nice job of introducing who they were before they spoke and summarizing where necessary to make the video shorter.  Besides that, the print article had only one picture, which was an old painting of Columbus, while the video summed up the human impact, as well as including interviews, still shots, and street views of Vermont to get the point across in a more creative way. It seems particularly interesting that the print story had such little information for being a local Vermont station.

Links can be found here:

Print Story: http://www.wmur.com/news/proclamation-changes-columbus-day-to-indigenous-peoples-day/42038090

Multimedia Story: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/us/columbus-day-indigenous-peoples-day/index.html