First Poll post

I was just looing around the three sites for polls, the New York times, real clear politics, and five thirty eight, and the first thing I realized was how varied all the information is. Some polls have Trump gaining ground and others having Clinton gaining ground. I think it may be hard to take out what the good polls are and what polls are presenting bad information.

I went to the New York Times site to look at polls and I really like the way the take all the polls from different sites and combines it all into clear information. On the Times site it takes information from all different states and shows who each state is favoring. This is a very good way to see who all the states are favoring this close to the election. It also shows how all the information for the poll was gathered at the bottom of the Latest Election Polls 2016.

The polls for this page do have some problems. It does not say who conducted the polls. This is just a preview for all the different polls but it also doesn't say how the participants of the polls were selected. This preview takes information from all the polls this site deals with to combine it into a more general view on the election polls so some of this information can not be provided.

Clinton Story Crit

Clinton story Crit

By Christian Hisman

The Clinton story written by Schmidt and Apuzzo was a story that seemed like it was rushed together and was not checked properly for correct facts. In the article it talks about the investigation that was requested on Clinton’s private email account. When in fact the request was not for specifically Clinton’s account but for any compromised information with connection to Clinton’s account. Having to see corrections at the bottom of the page made the entire article less trustworthy. They needed to take their time in getting the story out correctly rather than try to get it out as fast as possible. The article was up for anybody to read for two days with no corrections and could have lead people to not fully understand the story.

                The tone of the story was good for what the article was supposed to be. I feel the article just tried to state the facts and not turn blame toward Clinton too much. The lead paragraph, other than having incorrect facts, did a good job in starting the article with the right tone and setting up the rest of the article. I think the article was good to keep out any graphics or photos that would have not fit within the article. I do not think the article needed any photos because of the nature of the story.

               The attributions in the article matched well with what quotes were used. All quotes and other parts to the story that needed attribution got it. They did a good job on letting readers know where or who the statements came from. The personal information in this story was mostly about the emails that were sent and under question. Most of the emails reported in the article were about the Benghazi attacks in 2012. The articles were all seen as non-classified information at the time Clinton dealt with them. It seemed there was a lot of information in the article trying to clear her name when it came to those emails.

               The article was written well as far as grammar and spelling goes. I did not see any mistakes in spelling or a misuse of grammar elements but that should be expected in an article from the New York Times. There were some AP style discrepancies because the Times does not use the same type to style that we are used to because of their audience. There was abundance of Mrs. And Mr. in this article which would not be used in AP after the first mention of their name.

               When it comes to the article being fair or not I think it was fair on both sides of the story. It gave the facts and let the information tell the story. I think without the errors that were listed at the bottom of the article it was a good story. The only real problem with ethics of the story was the fact that they tried to push the story out to quickly which led to inaccuracies with certain facts. Ethically they should have known that the article needed more time to be correctly reported.  

Brown Crit

This is my Crit on the Brown Story:

The article by John Eligon seemed like it was trying to be sympathetic toward Michael Brown. It had a sad tone that made it seem that the author wanted Brown to be seen as a good person to the readers of the article. He took the time to point out all the good he has done even though it was not that relevant to the story in some parts.
 The article was well written as far as grammar and spelling goes. I do not think the article was pieced together very well. It seemed that the author went from one point to another and then would come back to a point that he made earlier in the article. I understand he wanted to put a good base of facts on Michael’s life but some parts did not flow from paragraph to paragraph that well. There was a sentence “He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor,” that seemed like it was just tacked onto the end and did not feel like it belonged there. I do understand why he put that sentence there but I thought he could’ve found a better way to work that into the earlier paragraph.
The article did not seem fair to me. There were parts that put Michael in a bad light just to clear it up in the next sentence. When the article talked about him being in photos with people that were in gangs just to say he was not in a gang seemed counter intuitive to the point the article should have been making. There was another part that talked about Michael almost getting in trouble for stealing an IPad but then in the next sentence saying the issue was cleared up did not seem important to the story, it just seemed like filler for the article.
 There were somethings that the author inferred that I did not think needed to be said. When the author said “Michael was a handful” it was never stated that anyone from the family actually said that. The author need to just state facts more and leave his assumptions out of the article. In another part the author said the Michael was “no angel” and that is something that could be said about anyone in the world. I thought it was just something that could have been left out of the article. I also don’t think the author should have said Michael was not the best student, that is something that should’ve been said in a quote from a family member or friend.
 The story seemed like the author was natural for the most part but he swayed on both sides for parts of the article. I do feel like race was needed in this story and it was why the story was so popular in the first place. I think that his religion was not something we needed to know about Michael. The one major AP mistake that was made was the Mr. and Mrs. Being put after every name. I did not correct that in the article because of the frequency of it appeared