News story example

 

 

Here's a news story from the Los Angeles Times about another high school shooting incident. Read this story taking notice of how the news is written, how attribution is used and the length of the paragraphs.

 

One student was killed and four were injured in a shooting Monday morning at a high school in suburban Chardon, Ohio, authorities have reported.

A suspect was taken into custody, but his name was being withheld because he's a juvenile, said Chardon Police Chief Timothy McKenna. The suspect, who is believed to be a student at the school, has yet to be charged, the chief said.

McKenna announced the death and injuries in a televised briefing. The injured students were hospitalized, McKenna said, but he gave no additional details on their conditions.

Earlier, officials had said the gunman opened fire with a handgun in the school cafeteria about 7:30 a.m. The victims were found in three separate locations.

An adult forced the gunman out of the building, and he was arrested nearby, McKenna said.

The deadliest shooting at a high school was on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Colorado. Two seniors -- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- killed 12 students and one  teacher. They also injured 21 other students; three people were injured while attempting to escape. The pair later committed suicide.

Columbine was the fourth-deadliest school massacre in United States history -- after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, and the 1966 University of Texas massacre.

The Token From Montgomery Cross Road

Here's my personality profile on Phyllis Slack that ran in the Feb. 26 edition of the Savannah Morning News. Read the feature and let me know what you think about the lead, the transition, descriptive details in the story and quotes. Click on the link below for the story.

http://savannahnow.com/accent/2012-02-26/savannah-trailblazer-woman-one-first-desegregate-local-schools#.T0nCSpgW-ZM

Personality Profile Example

Read this example of a personality profile. Evaluate the lead as to whether it hooks the reader's attention. Are direct quotes used effectively? Does the story flow smoothly? Are you able to locate the descriptive passages from the writer?

Bowling With World’s Best, Then Rejoining 8th Grade

By MARY PILON

NORTH BRUNSWICK, N.J. — In professional bowling, that corner of the sports landscape where gray-haired and balding athletes can thrive, Kamron Doyle presents something different.

He is 14 and he is winning prize money against the best bowlers in the world.

Sipping a blue sports drink and eating a Milky Way candy bar for breakfast Friday morning, Doyle, a 5-foot-5, 105-pound eighth grader, prepared for the next round of the United States Open, an event with nearly 400 competitors and a top prize of $60,000.

In advancing this far he had already become the youngest bowler to reach the prize-money level in a Professional Bowlers Association national tour event.

“We have no idea where he gets it,” said Sean Doyle, Kamron’s father, an orthodontist who seldom bowls.

Some family basements roar with the blare of a teen’s loud music. In the Doyles’ house in Brentwood, Tenn., the noise comes from Kamron’s bowling.

The family built two lanes in the basement in November. “It sounds like thunder when he’s down there,” Sean Doyle said.

Many of Kamron Doyle’s competitors here have been bowling professionally longer than he has been alive. Their swings were refined and they knew better how to play off the shifts of the oil on the 60-foot lane’s surface to make their balls curve just right.

Doyle bowls with a 14-pound ball (lighter than most) and does not have a coach. Long and lanky, he quietly strode the glossy floor, his back to dozens of perplexed fans staring at him.

“When I first saw him, the bowling ball was bigger than he was,” said Tommy Jones, a 33-year-old bowler from greater Greenville, S.C., who has become a friend and mentor to Doyle. “Now, he’s at a whole new level.”

Eleven of the bowlers in the United States Open field were 17 or younger, organizers said. Doyle was the only one among the top 98 players Friday morning.

“It’s very unusual,” Bill Vint, a spokesman for the P.B.A., said. “This is the toughest bowling tournament around, and to have him advance to the cash level is quite remarkable.”

By 9 a.m., having made several practice throws down the lanes at the Brunswick Zone-Carolier bowling alley, Doyle was ready for competition.

 On either side of him were some of the sport’s best known players, including Johnny Petraglia and Sean Rash. The smell of nachos hung in the air with the sound of crashing pins.

Players exchanged occasional high-fives or fist bumps with Doyle, but for the most part they did not speak to one another.

Although Doyle competes in professional tournaments, he is not technically a professional bowler, as he is not a member of the Professional Bowlers Association. (Roughly half the competitors in this week’s tournament meet this definition of professional.)

The governing body for bowling allows those 18 and younger to compete in elite tournaments while meeting amateurism requirements.

 Prize money is rolled into a scholarship fund. Doyle’s account so far has more than $20,000, which will be used for his college education.

Since bowling does not attract the endorsement deals available in some other sports, the current arrangement is fine, his father said.

“It’s not like someone is going to write him a check for $5 million,” he said.

Kamron Doyle traces his career to when he attended a birthday party at a bowling alley when he was 6.

He was hooked instantly, and repeatedly asked his parents to take him back to the bowling alley. He began to watch elite players on YouTube.

“I can’t really remember why I liked it so much at first,” he said. “I just remember watching some of those guys on TV and thinking I should do it, too.”

Neither of Doyle’s parents bowls, but now Sean ushers his son to tournaments. On Friday, he called his wife, Cathy, with frequent updates during Kamron’s games.

“It’s like a roller coaster today,” he told Cathy. Kamron bowled games of 246, 173, 226 and 163. Sean acknowledged that he is “a nervous wreck” when he watches his son compete, but said it beat standing out in the rain for a football game.

“No one expects him to play like he does,” Sean Doyle said. “It could be Kamsanity,” he added, a nod to the recent craze over Jeremy Lin of the Knicks. “Sometimes we have to tell him not to practice so much.”

After five hours of bowling, Doyle finished 61st Friday afternoon and did not advance to the evening round.

For the tournament, he averaged a score of 200.77 and knocked down 5,220 pins. His performance bested that of at least four members of the P.B.A.’s hall of fame — along with his mentor, Jones, who won this event in 2006 — and produced an additional $1,340 for his college fund.

On Monday, he will return to his middle-school classes.

“I did the best I could do,” he said after zipping his bowling balls in a red rolling bag. “I’m going to rest up and get back to practice in a day or two to prepare for next year. I’ve got a long time to practice.”

Feature writing example

This is a good example of feature writing from the Los Angeles Times. Notice the writer's use of observational details and color. Notice the short paragraphs and the many one-sentence paragraphs. How does the writer use quotes to move the story along? Does the writer give the reader a good sense of the subject's motivation and the reasons she lives such a unique lifestyle? Interesting people make interesting stories. These are the kind of people and stories you want to look for when you write a feature story.

    When Karin Hauenstein led her three horses down Vine Street, the girls in short skirts stilled their stiletto-heeled sashays, the incense hawkers stopped calling out to passersby, and Trader Joe's shoppers gaped through the glass at the convoy clip-clopping up the far right lane.
    Whether anyone registered more than surprise is hard to say. But on that recent afternoon, Hauenstein was making a statement.
    The 39-year-old horse trainer has come south from Santa Barbara County to protest the commercial slaughter of horses.
    Now, day after day, often after camping at night, she traverses Hollywood on her Thoroughbred Glory, with her pack horses, Smoke and Coley, following behind.
    Smoke is a mustang she helped capture and break trekking above Arizona's Mogollon Rim. Coley, a quarter horse, is porter in chief and billboard, with "END COMMERCIAL HORSE SLAUGHTER!" painted on pack boxes strapped to her sides.
    A long rider, Hauenstein once spent four years heading east on horseback. She is broad-shouldered and strong and wears heavy leather boots. She comes from campfire and corral, not miles and miles of concrete.
    "I look like I just came out of the mountains," she says.
    Still, she came to be seen and she has done her best to make that happen — tying the animals up outside Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles, grazing them alongside a Runyon Canyon yoga class, holding court in the parking lot of Gelson's on Franklin Avenue.
    They have posed with Wonder Woman and Korean tourists outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, stopped in at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and entertained children at a party at the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre International.
    California doesn't allow commercial horse slaughter. But the national picture is different. in November, Congress ended a five-year ban on funding U.S. inspectors to oversee horse meat processed for human consumption, paving the way for slaughterhouses to reopen.
    Hauenstein wants everyone to know.
    People often take journeys for causes. They cycle to fight cancer. They walk to end global warming. But adding horses to the mix isn't for amateurs, especially on the fly.

    Hauenstein had planned a spring protest ride. She still had a lot to organize when the bill passed but set off anyway, with many a loose end untied.
    She and the horses left her home outside Lompoc on Dec. 6, traveling at a top speed of 3 mph.
    She wasn't sure where she would be laying her head most nights or grazing her horses most days. Not that she worried.
    "I see myself kind of as a hobo on horseback, but not in a bad way," she says. "It's because I travel and I don't really know where I'm going to wind up necessarily."
    Hauenstein grew up northeast of Lompoc in rural Cebada Canyon. On her family's 420 acres, she was always around horses.
    "She has a rapport," says her mother, Gwen Hauenstein. "We bought a really troubled horse one time that had a lot of problems. She took that horse and turned it into the best riding horse that we ever had."

    For eight years after high school, Hauenstein worked behind a desk, for the local United Way. But by her late 20s, she was back with the horses.
    In 2001, she was training horses in Buellton when she saw Dane Hartwell, a wandering cowboy, interviewed on the news. He was passing through Santa Barbara, planning to ride toward the East Coast.

    I thought, what is this guy doing? I wanted to know him," Hauenstein says. So when his website popped up on the screen, she emailed him.
    Soon after they met, she liquidated everything she owned.
    Hauenstein and Hartwell hit the road with five horses — two for riding, three for shouldering supplies.
    What they were doing, she says, was "not an endurance ride, it was a lifestyle."
    They rode until their money ran out. They got jobs to earn cash. They rode again until the cycle repeated itself.
    The first big layover was in Las Vegas. Hired to help build a horse ranch, they stayed for months. And Hauenstein got pregnant.

    Hartwell, the father, would never settle down. Hauenstein's life, too, was nomadic. So before her baby was born, she arranged for an adoption that would let her keep in touch. (He's 8 now, she says, rooted and happy.)
    By the time she and Hartwell got to Magdalena, N.M., four years of hard travel had worn away at their happiness. Hauenstein left the trail with a couple of horses, a crushed dream, little cash, no car, no job.
    A friend brought her to Camp Verde, Ariz., to regroup; she worked as a teacher's aide and jail booking clerk, drove a school bus, fostered teens with severe behavioral problems.
    Eventually, she made her way home to Lompoc.
    In some ways, traveling by horse isn't so hard.
    It's legal, for instance, to ride on any road but a freeway.
    Satellite views on cellphones simplify feeding on the go. You can scope out meadows and valleys, many unfenced and lacking signs barring trespass.
    "With Google Earth, you can actually see the grass," Hauenstein says. It's all her horses need, and it's abundant this time of year. But they also get variety in the plants like clover and alfalfa that frequently sprout up with it.
    Hollywood's median strips are so overgrown, sustenance here has been simple to find, she says.
    For water, she fills her three-gallon collapsible bucket at the places she eats — at gas stations, at friendly homeowners' hoses.

Horse manure can be awkward. She scoops it when possible. But it's hard to persuade people to take it, even though it's great fertilizer.
    As for sleep, Hauenstein set up a few spots in advance. And as she rode down the coast, strangers offered other overnight space — backyards, ranches, sometimes a spare bed.

    But often she sought what shelter she could, next to her animals, under the stars.
    In the garden of Santa Barbara's Trinity Episcopal Church, she slept alongside homeless people, sharing her horse blankets and pads.
    In Ventura, she shut her eyes in an empty lot in an ocean-view neighborhood. She opened them to police and animal-control officers, called by neighbors.
    That happens all the time, she says, "but as long as you're prepared to move on, no one wants to hassle a real traveler."
    Here, Hauenstein has slept in two parks: Griffith and Runyon Canyon. She has laid a bedroll on the sidewalk alongside the Hollywood Presbyterian Church.
    She has also piqued the interest of horse people. One trailered her for a stay at another's Shadow Hills ranch, where the horses could be stabled and Hauenstein could rest. Another had hay delivered to Gower Street, where a pair of Mormon missionaries who happened by helped her drag it to the horses.
    To make her case about commercial slaughter, Hauenstein doesn't hand out fliers. When asked, she simply explains: Horses can be humanely euthanized, for less than the cost of a month's feed and board, and horse meat processed for human consumption can be unsafe because of high levels of adrenaline and cortisol.
    Barbara Sizemore, 46, a Studio City mortgage broker, drove past the horses on Gower Street and caught up with them on Sunset Boulevard.
    "I sign petitions. I write letters. What else can I do?" she asked Hauenstein, who directed her to websites and to her own .
    But Los Angeles also sometimes gives its attention stintingly.
    Before crossing into the city, Hauenstein grazed the horses in the grassy median on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.
    She watched as a big SUV pulled up. Two women got out and started waving their arms and arguing theatrically.
    Then they got back into the car, cool as cucumbers, as their cameraman reviewed what he'd shot.
    "It was so-called reality TV, but they never paid any attention to me," Hauenstein says.
    Nor, for the most part, did she turn many heads in a brief foray to the ever-crowded courtyard of Grauman's Chinese.
    She curbed the horses next to Iron Man, SpongeBob SquarePants, Darth Vader.
    In front of her, tourists held up cellphones, snapping sidewalk stars, prints in concrete.

    A security guard lunged forward, shouting, "I need these horses gone!"
    "OK, folks, Mr. Muscles has arrived," called out a large man in a biceps-baring, sleeveless shirt.
    "I'm just another distraction here," Hauenstein said, shrugging as she moved the horses along.

Lead writing practice

Instructions: Write a lead for the following items. You are writing for a small-town daily afternoon newspaper. You received the information in the morning and you will be writing the lead for that afternoon's edition of the newspaper. (The facts are accurate but do not necessarily conform to AP style).

Billy Bradley, 4116 Maple Street, won a scholarship worth $5,000.

Bradley will attend the State Institute of Technology.

Bradley plans to major in mechanical engineering.

Bradley was the valedictorian at Central High School last month.

Bradley is an orphan living with her uncle, John Bradley, who is a textile mill worker but is currently unemployed.

(Source: Central High School Principal J.E. Smith, announced yesterday).

New set of facts below:

Fire destroyed the home of Mr. and Mrs. C.W. Doakes, 222 Birch Drive, while the couple was at movies last night.

The dog, Rover, was left in the basement.

Mrs. Doakes collapsed upon returning from the movies.

Frame building enveloped in flames when firemen arrived.

Faulty electrical wiring believed to be the cause.

Home valued at $150,000.

(Source: Fire Chief H.X. Phillips).

Finding your voice

The great column writers have a unique voice. Their unique style is immediately clear to readers. Finding your voice is often difficult for beginning writers. It's also difficult to teach. Some writers are naturally funny. Others are contemplative. When you write a column you need to keep your voice in mind and try to develop a unique voice of your own.
Rich Tosches is a witty, funny column writer. We worked together on the Los Angeles Times and today he writes a regular column for a Colorado newspaper. I want you to read at least three of his columns and write a paragraph or two describing his voice. What impression do you get from his columns about his voice? What do you think of his columns? Did you find yourself laughing at them?

Type your answer to the questions above and post it on your blog. Then cut and past the URL and send it to me.

http://www.csindy.com/colorado/Search?cx=014743906834680989592%3Avylqe5v5s3u&cof=FORID%3A9&q=Ranger+Rich+columns&sa=Search