Reading Responses

The Marriage Cure
I found this to be a very interesting article. It was probably one of the more effective ones I've read this quarter in that even though I've only been to Oklahoma City once (and never to the areas mentioned), there was a universality and also a good detailed description enough for me to be able to vividly picture what was going on. I felt like none of the information given was unnecessary; I also felt like I had enough information to completely understand the article.

I think what made this effective was the way Boo made the problems faced by Corean and Kim as accessible to the New Yorker's general audience as possible. The effort to make sure to tell two stories that are ultimately both quite bleak, but frame one in as much hope as possible, was an interesting one, and I have to admit (because I always want more), I'm curious about the statistics of the people living in Sooner Haven - actual numbers associated with the problems that Boo tells us about through the lives of Corean and Kim - in addition to these admittedly very touching and thought-provoking stories.

As depressing as it was to read, this is one of those articles that made me want to learn more about the projects of Oklahoma City in my spare time. I do feel like Boo provided us with enough to tell the stories she knows, but this has sparked my interest (as I feel a good, strong piece of narration should). I'm sure that any number of housing projects in any number of cities around the United States could have been chosen, many of which the readers of the New Yorker might be more familiar with than Oklahoma City. I like the decision she made to pick a place that is more out of mind than most, and I think it added a dimension (e.g. with the "Indian option") to the narrative that might have been missed had she chosen to profile women from projects of a more regularly-thought-about city.

The French Fry Connection
In response to the article that Tanj and I picked for everyone to read, I thought I would talk briefly about the context for the piece. We located it through the google book version of Storycraft and the chapter provides a lot of interesting insight and context into the process that Richard Read went through in order to create the story. It portrays the series of articles as a labor of love, as apparently, The Oregonian did not have much interest in posting that kind of series of articles - newspapers and magazines were doing spot treatments of the issue, and the article Richard Read proposed took too much time and effort. He managed to convince people that an explanatory piece on the Asian economic crisis was important, however, and purportedly worked quite hard to manage to get so many "ins" in order to tell the complete story, starting with allowing the Hutterite community to become familiar enough with him to share the secrets of their farming to following the potatoes (and fries) on to their ultimate destination McDonalds.

I know when I was browsing everyone elses' blogs earlier someone - I forget who - mentioned that his article was not well-sourced. I would agree that it came across like that. However his sources are made clear in the contextualizing chapter within Storycraft - an American couple booked passage on the ship that sent everything from the farm to Hong Kong, and Read convinced them to take detailed notes of the passage before flying over, himself (There's more, and the chapter is actually quite interesting if anyone has the time to read it).

In response to the article itself, I feel like it does an effective job at portraying the Asian economic crisis in a context that is accessible to American readers, though I agree that it can be a little bit repetitive. I wonder if I was more okay with that because I read the context chapter, though, especially because the chapter provided insight into the general narrative arc of pieces like this.

Aaron Aupperlee's articles
I found this collection of articles quite interesting. I especially appreciated seeing the ways in which audio slideshows were constructed for the stories of Dylan Radabaugh and Paul Powell and the Chittock street article.

I especially appreciated these articles as concrete examples of how to maneuver within word count limit, something that I know that I, personally, struggle with, and that I'm sure others struggle with as well. I was left unsatisfied at the end of most of them, because I always want to know more, but ultimately I am happy with how the stories were portrayed. My dissatisfaction - the article about the Grass Lake boys was great for depicting their friendship and recovery, but I was constantly hoping to find out what different accidents happened to each of these boys to put them in the same kind of place, but I can say that I did like the treatment of their injury in matter-of-fact terms so much better than I liked the piece on brain surgery that we read at the beginning of the quarter. The article about Chittock street felt somewhat short and topical even with the added audio slideshows, though I do think that Aupperlee did a good job at humanizing the street ultimately. I have fewer contentions with the story about the alcoholic mother, though I feel like since there was such an emphasis on her role as a cancer survivor in the headline, it should have been more emphasized within the narrative itself.

Overall, I do appreciate these examples of human interest stories that are made to fit within a certain wordcount, but which are augmented by multimedia presentations, though.

Captive Audience
The thing I like best about radio journalism is the way that different voices can flesh out a narrative by providing a better mental image of how the story is going. In this specific context, the presence of the accents and of the Spanish (which I'm no longer as familiar with as I should be) helped, in my opinion, to craft a sense of immediacy. I think it would have worked less well if the narrator of the segment did not provide loose translations, however.

I think that the story of Viviana and the story of the narrator work decently well together, though I do think that the way they were woven together could have possibly been restructured and still been effective. I'm not sure how that would best be accomplished, however.

I found the story very compelling and interesting, especially the information that the radio segments that the loved ones of kidnapping victims record and put onto the air actually reaches the kidnapped people regularly because guards allow them to listen to the segment to keep up morale. Overall, I walked away from listening to this piece feeling like I learned a lot about something I previously knew nothing about, which is really what a segment like this should do.

Like with the Marriage Cure article, I think it's a good decision that a story that could be construed as a success is portrayed alongside a story that has an uncertain outcome in order to both leave the listener feeling hopeful but to caution them that these problems are ongoing and messy and not easily resolved.

Yemen series
I have to admit that I went into this reading biased - my roommate is/was a peer leader this academic year, so we had the summer common reading book sitting in our place all last spring, and I would pick it up when bored for a while, and I felt like a lot of the ways the story was told were inappropriately paced or placed. So I was not really expecting much from the Yemen readings.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the Yemen articles. They were an easy read and full of rich description. [more forthcoming; i have it written down in longhand so i just need to type it out]