The newspapers article on Time World Magazine “Why Did Charles de Gaulle Take a Fall?” (Crumley, May 30, 2004) is set to uncover the cause of the collapse of Charles de Gaulle airport in France. The article does not provide any details as to why the building came crumbling a few months after its completion. Suggestive pieces of writing need to begin with an informative history of an item and then proceed to possible causes and then narrow down to the highly probable ones. The quality issue is that the article fails to connect the reasons why the airport terminal crumbled. The first paragraph of the writer explores a brief construction history of the airport and paragraph two quickly switches to the consequences of the terminal collapse. This leaves a gap in what happened during the fall. Moreover, no substantive witness accounts and structural engineer reports are in use to give the piece depth of analysis.
One of the quality tools that can be used to eliminate the problem is the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. It calculates the number of years of education one needs to understand a piece of writing. This is an analysis tool that tests a journalist’s competence and also gauges the audience’s comprehension of the written material. Through it, the article may be evaluated on the premise of whether it meets the intended reader’s expectation. Another tool of importance is the editorial excellence inventory which aids newspapers to monitor and measure news content. It works through a scorecard on performance objectives met by the editor over time. This creates a track of factors that improve or decrease readership. The combined use of the two tools encapsulates the entire process of journalism from information gathering to dissemination thereby analyzing every step of news production.
To deal with the problem identified in the article, first, it would be paramount to construct an apt title for the article, after which comparative paragraphs are written to relate the provided proof and the title of the writing.
The article on The Wall Street Journal “Shanghai Building Collapses, Nearly intact” (Canaves, June 29, 2009) is a concise article that recounts the event of the tragic collapse of the apartment block in China Shangai province. The article fails to register a chronology of the events that led to the plummeting of the structure despite its precise format. This distorts how the information consumption by the reader and breaks the flow of the story. The first paragraph mode of writing is in an analytical form instead of prose reporting that introduces the context of the story. The quality issue is the lack of flow in the storyline from the pre-events of the disaster to the aftermath of the accident.
To solve the above-stated problem, tools for evaluating information relevance are to be employed. Source data can be evaluated using Pareto analysis to produce a minimum set of facts that is essential in creating a concise story. Occurrences that have loads of source information can be cumbersome to process and present in a concise form.
Another means of monitoring the quality of news in this article is by use of cause-and-effect diagrams. The fishbone diagrams identify related information that can be used to make arguments. Solving the problem identified in this article will first require a gathering of related information that surrounds the collapse of the building in Shanghai. Then, using a grounded theory approach, make inferences from the data. Finally, pick a set of few conclusions to write up the story.
References
Canaves, Sky. (2012). Shanghai Building Collapses, Nearly Intact. The Wall Street Journal. Web.
Crumley, Bruce. (2004). Why Did Charles de Gaulle Take a Fall?. The Time World Magazine. Web.