Blog Post #5 - CBSNews.com

The article I read for this week is from CBSNews.com.

This article is about a bizarre and very public battle between two Chinese bureaucratic departments, the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publications. These two departments are fighting over who has the right to oversee the administration of the World of Warcraft, a popular online game.

The General Administration of Press and Publications, the bureau that licenses publishers, has shut down the game servers saying the game's Chinese operator failed to obtain required import approval and should stop signing up customers. The Ministry of Culture said that it is the regulator of online games and that the operator's paperwork is in order.

Because the gaming industries in China has a lot of potential for growth, whoever gets to oversee this game would then have claim to oversee the entire online gaming industry. This would mean a larger budget and more administrative power for that department and more importantly, control over the Internet.

The one thing I noticed in this article, was the stylistic differences between The Canadian Press style and The Associated Press style. These differences forced me to refer my CP Stylebook and Caps and Spelling book many times while reading the article and writing this post. While I may not have learned anything specific from the stylebook, continually having to check that my writing conforms to CP style, is helping me to learn how to use the stylebook better.

In my opinion, the story could be tightened up by eliminating the repetition of information that occurs at the top of the story and midway through the story. I also noticed that there were some instances where the writer had not sourced his information. This left me to wonder where he got his information. In general, I think this was a decent piece of writing though and I liked the way the writer used his quotes.