Assignment 2-1: Aritcle Critique

For this assignment I decided to critique an article I found on the New York Times website (www.nytimes.com), titled, "Annual Poll of Freshman Shows Effect on Recession," written by Kate Zernike on January 21, 2010. The article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/education/21college.html?em) reports on the results of a survey conducted on college freshman all around the country and how the recession is affecting many different decisions college freshman are now making.

The first criterion the book covers is attributing your sources correctly, which Zernike accomplished. In the fifth paragraph she cited the program that completed the survey (Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA) as well as the director of the program (John H. Pryor). Another criteria Mencher describes in the book is accuracy or also referred to as verification. Verification means that the reporter made sure the information she received was credible and that the data was not fabricated. Obviously the reporter in this case has better ways and more sources than I do, so I am going to assume that she did. I did find the homepage for the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) as well as its many surveys conducted.

Objectivity is an important part of being a good reporter. Zernike does this well, she seems to take no side in the article and can be described as being fair and balanced. It would be hard however to take a side in this specific example, she is just reporting the statistics of a survey. Unless she was using misleading statistics it would be hard not to be objective in this instance.

For an article to have all components is should be complete (do all investigation) while having brevity (being brief/concise). These two components are very hard to get the right balance but I believe Zernike did a good job balancing the two. Survey results and statistics are a hard thing to write about because all they are is numbers, but the writer needs to make them more than just a number; each statistic should be described so an average person can understand their meaning. The writer does a really good job describing each statistic and how it relates to previous years. This is important because if you can’t relate a statistic to some other data then it’s just a number with no significant value. The article was complete with enough information but it also was concise enough not to lose my interest.

Lastly, the Focus of the article is important for the reader to be able to learn something from the article. This works together with the component, Human Interest. The writer should tell the story in human terms. I believe the writer did this be showing how there is a direct correlation between the economy and the decisions of first year college students. I enjoyed the article because it showed how people all over the country are being affected by the recession, which made it easier to read.

Overall I enjoyed the article, I thought it was informative but didn’t throw in an overwhelming amount of statistics and data that do not mean anything to the average person.