Journalism plays an influential role in people’s opinions on a certain topic. In this unit, our class explored the key elements of a newspaper article by annotating good examples from the Scholastic News and Times magazine. During this unit, we learned the 5W’s and H, the point of views, and tone of writing the newspaper articles. After that, we wrote our own news article and put it together with other articles with different topics as our final project.

Below is my group news article, compare and contrast paragraphs of two articles, and annotations of two articles on the same topic.

Compare

Both “Texas Faces Massive Flooding” and “Catastrophe in the Gulf” are about the same topic. Their main purpose is to inform readers about the situation Hurricane Harvey caused at Texas. To reach their purpose, both articles used images, statistics, and estimations to give the audience a better idea about this issue. They used images retrieved from the actual place to let people have a better idea of what is actually happening. Statistics were provided from weather reports and scientific research. They also used quotes from important people such as Donald Trump and the Texas governor to let us know how the government is taking action. In their report, both articles start with a short sentence or paragraph about the main idea of their whole writing. It gives the 5Ws and H from the first part of the article, so people can get interested in their story to read on. Also, the audience both articles are aimed towards are kids. They provide definitions for terminologies and used easier word choices so the reader can understand. I also noticed that both articles ended with a quote about a hopeful thought from someone. I think this can reach the person of letting people become hopeful of what would happen next.

Contrast

Even though both articles are about the same topic, they wrote it in different ways. For the organization, the “Texas Faces Massive Flooding” used subtitles to organize their paragraphs into categories. This doesn’t only make it easier for readers to read, but also prevents the writer from jumping around topics in their writing. Both articles retrieved quotes from the Texas governor Greg Abbott and US president Donald Trump, but the “Catastrophe in the Gulf” kept the whole quote on the article, while the “Texas Faces Massive Flooding” cut out parts of the quote to only show the keywords. Only showing the keywords made their meaning more precise and prevented too much biased sources. Speaking of bias, “Catastrophe in the Gulf” specially mentioned a CNN reporter helping the people into safety, when there were so many helping cases to talk about. Even though the reporter didn’t mean to be biased, it made me think that this article is slightly biased towards the CNN.

Annotation