This first masterpiece is actually from last Sunday. “Dru Smith’s love affair with defense” by Joel Lorenzi. I loved! the headline and the summary though. I don’t normally read the sports section too thoroughly, but this headline caught my attention. I thought the language in it was excellent, the voice was captivating and I thought the secondary interviews gathered really added to the piece. This was excellent.
Next,
The lede that’s pictured above, written by Jonathan Jain, was excellent! What a way to hook the readers. It drew me in. The voice pictured here is continued throughout the story. The reporter let the quotes take the lead in this story and got extensive material while interviewing a variety of sources. I thought it was really interesting.
I also liked this collection of quotes titled Forecast: How business practices are likely to change after the pandemic. I thought it was great they had gotten such a collection of voices and presenting it like this, especially for the print edition, worked really great. It’s also very timely and something our readers want to know. I was semi-surprised by some, and others were like common sense to me. It was a great team effort!!
Next, I want to discuss an event and the way it was covered. Tristen and Nate both shared an article on Facebook which caught my attention. They were upset about the title, thinking that stronger language than bizarre be used for the act of a cameraman being choked.
The article they shared was titled “Fans stunned by ‘bizarre’ moment security guard chokes cameraman” published by Yahoo! Sport Australia.
Compare that to these other headlines I found about the same incident:
St. Bonaventure videographer restrained by security after A-10 title game by The Buffalo News
Security chokes videographer after he ran from him after A-10 title game by Total Pro Sports
So, I read the stories, and watched the video that accompanied them that actually showed the incident, although most of them first showed the photo below, featured in this tweet.
From watching the video, and knowing what came after, here’s what happened: Nathan DeSutter, a videographer working for the team and university, was filming the end game celebration on the court. Now, he was allowed there, but most media weren’t. So, the security guard attempted to remove Nathan, who then ran away from and around the security guard and back on the court to film. It’s at this point that the security guard grabs Nathan around the neck as you see in the photo, as he escorts him off the court. University staff quickly realized the misunderstanding and spoke with the guard, allowing Nathan to return to filming.
I think in this instance, both parties are to blame. The security guard shouldn’t have grabbed Nathan that way, but he was just trying to do his job. You can see in the video that his hold is very loose around Nathan’s neck and Nathan allows himself to be led off. Nathan shouldn’t have been restrained like that, especially since he was in a spot he was allowed to be, but I don’t think running away from the guard was the best decision. I think this escalation could have been avoided if Nathan had taken a moment to explain that he was allowed to be there when the guard first approached him and asked him to leave, which you can see in the video.
Because of this, I feel like a lot of the titles were maybe a little exaggerated in their headlines. Especially the Yahoo one, I feel like it paints the guard to be a villain, Nathan as some innocent cameraman, uses the verb ‘chokes’.
I thought the next headline, St. Bonaventure videographer restrained by security after A-10 title game, was better in using the word restrained and seems less accusatory. While I thought it was a pro move for Total Pro Sports to include that it was only after the cameraman ran from the security guard.
So, I don’t know. Readers, please take a look at these articles yourself and let me know what you’d do.
I’ll wrap up this week’s thoughts by drawing attention to the beautiful graphic and story published Thursday. I thought the graphic was wonderful and easy to read and drew my attention into the story. This was a great way to present the info to someone who isn’t sports centered.