Blog Post #10 - USA Today

This week's article is from the USA Today. Originally, I found this story from a related story on IGN.com.

The story is an interview with "legendary comic scribe" Grant Morrison. Morrison was the lead writer on a recent story arc from DC Comics, called Final Crisis, where it appeared as though Bruce Wayne, the original Batman, was killed by a megalomaniacal evil god, known as Darkseid. Morrison is also the writer for the Batman series. In the interview, the interviewer talks to Morrison about the recent developments in the Batman series and what the writer has in store for Batman in 2010.

The story-telling element of this article is pretty standard. It gives the most recent and relevant info at the top and then moves to set up the interview. What I found most interesting was how the interviewer setup his interview and what sorts of questions he asked. The interviewer had a great deal of knowledge on the subject at hand, and was able to have an engaging and ultimately interesting interview with Morrison. Structurally, the article is mostly Q&A, but based on the length of Morrison's responses it seems to make sense to set it up that way.

The IGN article was a little more interesting to me than just the straight-up Q&A article in the USA Today. The IGN article is a lot more casual in its writing style and is probably done that way based on the audience that they expect frequents the site. The author keys in on some of the interesting parts of the USA Today interview and adds in a bit of his analysis. Quite honestly, what drew me to this article, aside from the fact that it was about Batman, was the article's deck: "The original Dark Knight fights through time to regain the life that was taken from him." Even though I knew what the article would be about, having read these comic book series, I was immediately hook by the deck because of how fantastic the author made his article sound. That being said, the author does have some awkward sentences, which makes the article hard to read.

Blog Post #9 - The Escapist

This week's article is from The Escapist, an online video game newsite.

This article is about a very controversial topic in video games right now: nudity. The article also addresses the issues of piracy and reselling video games.

While this is an opinion piece, it has a pretty standard inverted pyramid structure. I think this article does a good job of writing for its audience. Specifically, it makes reference to the "Hot Coffee" issue which if you are unfamiliar with video games, has no real meaning for you. Also, the tone of the article is light and uses humour. It also uses a few cliches. Now, I know that as journalists we try to avoid using them, but I think in this piece, the cliches work.

I also thought the author's choice of words was interesting throughout the article. In talking about nudity in this article, specifically female nudity, he begins by using the word "breast" and "nipple" to talk about the nudity in the game. As the article progresses, he uses the phrases "double D dividends", "virtual boobs", "boobies" and "boobs". Finally, the author uses the word "tits" at the end of the article. I'm not entirely sure why the author does this, but I suspect it has to do with the nature of his audience. I think he begins with the anatomical words because they are in large part the least offensive words to use. The author then uses more slang-style words to refer to female body parts, and then finally uses a fairly vulgar one. I believe the author does this because, at the beginning of the article the author has already told gamers the important stuff, which is how they can get their nudity, so it is likely that they've stopped reading the article to go and get their digital boobs and will therefore not be offended by his vulgarity at the end of his article.