Reading Journal: 12/29/11

Today the New York Times published a front-page story that I think is emblematic of what’s wrong with a lot of NYT reporting. The article was “Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School: Upgrading Their Skills Rather Than Settling for Low Pay” by Catherine Rampell. The problem with it, as usual, wasn’t that it wasn’t well-researched (it was brimming with statistics), or cogently-written (the author makes a persuasive case that yes, more young women these days are using the economic downturn as an opportunity to go back to school instead of working crappy, low-paying jobs). The problem is that the NYT seems to fundamentally downplay the importance of actually talking to the people they’re reporting on.

The article had solid evidence for what the news was: the economy sucks, good jobs are scarce, statistics are showing that a disproportionate number of young women are dropping out of the labor force.

But it also had a truly staggering, almost insulting, number of sense-makers. In total four experts were interviewed, including not one but two economists, a research director at a Chicago think thank, and the president of a community college in North Carolina. And what was the cumulative conclusion of their insights? The shocking revelation that (wait for it....) more young women are enrolling in college. Why we needed four separate experts and a comprehensive info-graphic to confirm the obvious fact that young women departing from the workforce has coincided with young women enrolling in school, is quite frankly beyond me. But thank you NYT for being so thorough.

If only if they could have been equally thorough in their coverage of real live women who are actually affected by this change. In contrast to the experts consulted, only one woman undergoing this transition (a Master’s candidate named Lauren Baker, who recently quit her job at Starbucks to go back to school) was actually interviewed for the article.

As a reader, I found this a little offensive. I understand the importance of experts, and I’m reassured to know that the New York Times has such knowledgeable sources at their disposal, I really am. But if the decisions of young women are only discussed and conjectured about at length by outside experts, while the women themselves are not being given their own voices, this is, what author Kate Zambreno would label, "a huge fucking problem", (especially given that the subject matter of this article so obviously intertwined with complex feminist issues). For shame, NYT.

But anyway, moving on. In an article published yesterday, titled Keeping Boomers Fit for Work, the Wall Street Journal reported on companies that have been making a concerted effort to keep aging workers healthy, to avoid job turnover.

The author reports that, "Duke Energy Corp. offers a special stretching program for its line technicians before they start a shift. Harley-Davidson Inc. has trainers stand ready to ice down inflammations between shifts at one of its engine plants." In contrast to the NYT article, I thought that the WSJ actually did a really good job of covering those making the news, affected by the news, as well as sense-makers.

In terms of news-makers, they interview the director of University of Michigan's Center for Ergonomics (where they have been trying to accomodate their surgeons by adapting surgical techniques that are less physically demanding), both the general plant manager and a senior health and safety specialist at Harley-Davidson, and a general manager of safety and health at the mining company Unimin.

News affected sources here include Barry Poe, a 53-year-old Duke line technician, and Orlando "Gonzo" Meza, a 52-year-old cement-truck driver for Vulcan. There are also specific details about what kinds of changes have been implemented for workers: at Unimin, workers used to have to "carry 40-pound buckets of silicate material down a narrow catwalk to reach a mixing tank, then bend over to tip the silicate into the tank. Now Unimin uses pumps to get that material into the tank", at Vulcan "Chutes used for wet concrete are now made of lighter composite materials instead of steel, reducing the weight to 27 pounds from about 48," and at Harley-Davidson trainers are stationed at on-site gyms, to "prepare exercise routines tailored to individual jobs and have ice packs available at shift change."

For sense-making the author provides an infographic from the Bureau of Labor statistics showing that in a survey of 10,000 middle-aged workers in the private sector, injuries have fallen by almost 10% in the last four years. He also speaks to Joseph Couphlin, director at the AgeLab at MIT who says that "More employers should be preparing to deal with an older, frailer work force."

Overall, I thought the second article was successful because it gave great specifics, had good sense-making, and most importantly, talked to all the right people.

Reading Journal: Sources

Reading Journal:
Tuesday Dec. 6, 2011

In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Miram Elder reports on the Russian response to a recent parliamentary election where Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, lost a significant amount of seats.

I found this story really tough to dissect because there’s so much going on in it (and so many sources cited). Elder provides quotes from 8 different sources that cut across the political spectrum.

There seemed to be three main things that constituted the news or the “what” of the article: firstly that Putin’s party is waning in power (this clearly carries the biggest impact), secondly that news of election results were followed by protests, and thirdly that the protest was met by a police crackdown ordered by the Kremlin.
The lede indicates that the immediate news we should be focusing on is that “The Kremlin mobilised thousands of police, interior troops and pro-government youth groups on Tuesday night to crack down on protests,” but clearly this is just a smaller piece of bigger news.
The police seem to be the news-maker of the immediate news, and on that score they are used as a source. But the bigger news-maker is probably the Russian parliament who voted Putin’s party down, and no one from the parliament is quoted.

I categorized the protestors as the people affected by the news, since they weren’t involved in the results, but will be voting in the upcoming election (which, by the time I post this blog entry, may have already happened)—their voices were the most represented in the article. But the only sense-making came from the author, in specific contextual examples like her inclusion that if Putin were to get reelected he would be in power until 2024. Similarly in the final paragraph she touches on the importance of LiveJournal in Russia as a mobilizing platform for youth. I think both of these areas could have used quotes from experts to further back up the author’s assertions, and also because the article feels uneven in its coverage of protestors vs. experts.

The NYT published an article on Thursday following up on comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that held the Russian election had not been conducted fairly, and the response that her comments elicited from Putin.
I thought that the New York Times piece was more insightful and had a more balanced spectrum of sources than the Guardian. The authors, Herszenhorn and Myers, set up the article first with a play-by-play of Clinton and Putin's (the two news-makers here) interchange.

First they bring in Putin's displeased remarks about Clinton“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that [election results] were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers").

Then the authors go on to analyze Putin's statement, concluding that his choice to "single out" Clinton was "strikingly personal","effectively thrust the United States on the side of the protesters in the streets challenging the Kremlin’s authority." They point to Clinton's previous "outspoken" criticism of the election as a motivating factor behind his strongly worded response.

The authors then segue back to the protests that broke out after the election, and bring in a new voice: Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political analyst. As a key sense-maker, Markov affirms that the opposition demonstrations are indicative of a widespread belief in Russia that there was fraud at play in the election, "especially", as he says, "in Moscow and Petersburg."

His predictions about what would eventually come out of the elections were especially helpful to understanding the broader implications of Putin's discrediting remarks toward Clinton—and to rising tensions between the US and Russia. "Mr. Markov said he expected the government to treat the public like a whining child. 'The authorities will attempt to conduct themselves with society as a parent would a child who is crying and demanding some kind of toy,' he said. 'In this case, it is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy, but rather distract him with something else.' Mr. Putin’s accusations of foreign meddling could provide that distraction.

I think that the core news of this article (Clinton's allegations that the election were unfair) most directly affects Putin and his representatives, and since he was quoted responding to Clinton (as was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin) the news-affected perspective seems covered. I don't think they needed to include protestors, but it probably wouldn't have hurt.

Felix Morelo: Portrait of a Street Artist

In New York City, unfamiliar faces greet you at every corner; from cursory glances exchanged by passing strangers on the sidewalk, to unreciprocated stares on the subway. But in Union Square, the busied hub of lower Manhattan, faces can be found in a more unlikely source: looking up at you from the ground.

These particular faces cannot talk, but their words are sometimes calcified in chalk speech bubbles drawn next to them.



They are the creation of Felix Morelo, a Colombian street artist, who has been regularly drawing them all over the gum-splotched hexagonal brick tiles that cover Union Square, as well as on neighboring city blocks, for the past three years. Now a neighborhood fixture, Morelo can also sometimes be seen sitting in Union Square with a cardboard sign offering free advice.

For casual admirers and fans of Morelo’s work alike, his chalk faces are often a source of amusement and encouragement. Fans who happen to catch Morelo in the act of drawing his faces will often stop to tell him that his work has cheered them up, on the way to wherever they may have been going. But to the contrary, the faces were born out of a much different emotion.

Looking out on Union Square from a wooden table in a Starbucks on 17th Street, Morelo described anger as the primary motive behind his street art. His face, while quick to break into a smile, instantly hardens when the topic of how he came to create his street art arises.

"People think it's happy, but it's not," said Morelo definitively.

Like generations of artists before him, Morelo has suffered in the pursuit of his art. He was forced to drop out of Parsons, just three credits shy of a earning a BFA, after he defaulted on his student loans. Since then, he has devoted himself to breaking into the art world while simultaneously struggling to support himself financially.

Amid a litany of odd jobs that included construction work, cutting meat as a butcher, and working as a bike messenger, Morelo hit a rough patch that included a period of homelessness, during which he lived on the streets.

“All my failures led me to do the faces,” said Morelo of his mounting frustrations.

But for an aspiring fine artist who found himself unable to catch the attention of the art world or get his own solo show (“I’ve never really been good at networking,” Morelo readily concedes) he was able to seek inspiration from another likeminded figure: a street artist named James De La Vega, who dismissed the gallery world in favor of publicly displayed chalk drawings.

“The big advantage [of chalk] is that it’s legal,” Morelo explained.

He added of De La Vega’s successful method that the trick is in taking simple phrases and “just repeating [them] over and over until you start getting recognized.”

Morelo’s signature phrase is probably his “bad luck spot,” a chalk circle drawn at random on the sidewalk that portends doom for anyone who should step in it.

The realization of quick, easily repeated catchphrases did not come to him immediately. He initially started experimenting with chalk by doing his usual drawings on the sidewalks around the city, until he found that it wasn’t working. That’s when Morelo says he came up with the faces, a theme that had already been pervasive throughout all his drawings. “They signified a longing or desire to be surrounded by people, rather than being homeless, or all alone, no girlfriend.”

When he started drawing faces on the ground at Union Square, a shape began to take hold. “The first time I did 50 faces, and everything clicked,” said Morelo. “I started realizing the pattern would disrupt the hexagon tiles.”

Even better, he found he could that he could churn out a large quantity of drawings in no time at all— each face took only seconds to draw. If he did an entire block of faces in this way, people would have to look at him.

To date, his most expansive project has been a series of faces that stretched from 10th Ave. to Avenue C. along 14th Street.

By making the move to street art Morelo feels that he has finally succeeded in forcing people to acknowledge him; or in his own words, to say, “Look at me motherfuckers! I may not be able to speak properly, but you’re going to look at my work.”

Now Morelo lives and maintains a studio in a space that he rents illegally with his girlfriend. His chief hope for the future is to get grants and fellowships that might enable him to focus on creating art for the rest of his life without having to worry about monetary limitations.

Although chalk is his signature, Morelo says he would love to get commissioned to do murals around the city. Chalk has its own downsides.

“It makes me sad, disappointed it’s not gonna last,” Morelo says of the drawings that gradually fade, sometimes washing away overnight if it rains. It’s like a metaphor for life, he says: “If you see it, take a photograph, because it’s only here for a moment.”

Anecdotal ledes

            Today’s NYT article on Rick Perry begins like this: “COLLEGE STATION, Tex. — Rick Perry arrived on the campus of Texas A&M University in the tumultuous fall of 1968, cut his hair short, regulation army style, and donned a uniform. College students across America were rising up against the Vietnam War, but Mr. Perry, a member of the Corps of Cadets here, would not be among them.”

            At first it seems like we’re about to be told a certain kind of story about Rick Perry — probably some laudatory piece about how he defied his college peers and stood up for what he believed was right— but then out of the blue, the article veers off into another direction entirely. That’s what I like so much about this lede; that it keeps you on your toes a little.

            Though the article begins with a snapshot of Perry’s college years amid the tumult of the 1960’s, what it’s really about is his military service and how it shaped his later politics (or maybe how his politics influenced his decision to enlist). But his college years at Texas A&M are quickly abandoned after the first couple grafs. 

            This narrative shift reminded me a little of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” In Caro’s  biography of Robert Moses, he begins by sharing a brief but revealing anecdote about an argument Moses got into while on the swimming team at Yale, and the way Moses ends the argument lays the groundwork for “the man he would eventually become.” Although it's a little novel-y I think this kind of coming-of-age storytelling device works well in a profile of an important political figure like Perry, because it gives us exactly the kind of colorful description of Perry that we want to hear: the man he was becoming before he entered into the military or politics (assisted by a great visual detail about his haircut, and an amusing photo of him in his corps of cadets uniform ). It's a good example of how an anecdotal lede doesn’t necessarily need to sum up a ‘thesis’, but can help set up the rest of the story. 

            The lede in today’s business article “A Voice Suggests Door-Busters Can Wait,” (a story about the employee backlash against Black Friday hours) was less successful. My problem with the lede, which begins “Anthony Hardwick never thought of himself as an activist or even much of an organizer...” is just that it seems like such a boring choice out of a million ways to begin a story. The article itself is such a relatable human-interest story (who wouldn’t sympathize with a guy making minimum wage who had to work through Thanksgiving?), but the lede fails to capture any of that sentiment. And to be completely honest, I tune out a little when I hear the word “organizer” or “activist,” because they're so overused, so I have to wonder why the author chose to use them to hook us.

            I also liked the anecdotal lede in  “The Witch Wears Silk Suits”, an article that ran in today's metro section of the Times, even though it was pretty cheesy: "It was the night before Thanksgiving, and the Witch Queen of New York was not stirring her brew or flying on her broom. Well, she did have her broom, but she was using it to sweep up the Pagan Center of New York, her headquarters in the Bronx..." I don't usually like campy writing like this, but I think this writer pulls it off by going 100% into it. (The following line doesn't disappoint either: "'Where the heck is that dustpan?' said the witch, Lady Rhea, 60, a Wiccan high priestess who was pulling off a nearly magical level of multitasking..." Another obvious difference about this piece is that the off-beat subject matter demands a little humor. A jokey lede here is more permissible than it would be in either of the above articles. Overall, I didn't think the tone detracted from the piece at all, especially because the woman profiled sounds like such a character that it seemed like the tone fit her personality rather than being condescending.    

Article 2

Intro To Journalism
Article 2
Occupy Wall Street Kitchen To Go on Strike?


For the duration of the upcoming Halloween weekend of October 28-30th
the “People’s Kitchen” at Zuccotti Park will be enforcing a massive
cut-back in its food distribution, in what the Occupy Wall Street
protest has called an effort to “strengthen” their operations.

“Hello Occupiers and Friends!,” states a laminated flyer taped to one
of the plastic folding tables that comprises the food station at
Occupy Wall Street. “In the coming days the People’s Kitchen of Occupy
Wall Street will be initiating some changes to help us better fulfill
our mission to feed the movement.”

Although the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going on
for over a month, has received significant media attention for its
sophisticated cuisine — The New York Times published an article on
October 11th lauding the kitchen efforts, titled “Want to Get Fat on
Wall Street? Try Protesting” — the People’s Kitchen announced that
fare over the three-day undertaking will be reduced to “Simple meals
(such as beans and rice, PB&J, fresh fruit).”

On October 27th, The Atlantic Wire reported that the organization’s
plan to scale-back was nothing more than a logistical initiative to
better organize the Occupied Kitchen that was being sensationalized by
the press. "I can definitely tell you that none of us are concerned
about 'freeloaders,' " said Chris O'Donnell, an organizer, to The
Atlantic Wire.

Contrary to the claims of O’Donnell and the statements formally
released by Occupy Wall Street, kitchen worker Nan Terrie said that
kicking out freeloaders was precisely the aim of the People’s Kitchen.

Terrie, who has been volunteering in the kitchen since Day 1 of the
protest, described security issues at the kitchen as being a bigger
issue than O’Donnell claimed they were.

Terrie said that aside from dealing with frequently vexing behavior
from patrons like “complaining” and “cutting in line”, she was
recently threatened with violence by a visitor to the People’s Kitchen
who was angered that the kitchen staff would not cater to his personal
food request. Terrie said that when she refused to make the man “a
special rice krispie treat”, “[He] pulled a knife on me and called me
the ‘N word’ several times."

Benedict Clouette, a worker in the People’s Kitchen, downplayed
Terrie’s concerns, saying that they were the opinions of one person
and not shared among the staff. “That’s not really the dominant tenor
of the kitchen now,” said Clouette in a phone interview.

Clouette, who said the decision to scale back on food was not a
strike, said that the primary motivation was to make the kitchen run
more efficiently, and give organizers time to reflect on what
direction the protest is headed. “Right now there’s a huge amount of
energy that just goes into running it every day, and in the morning we
don’t know who’s going to volunteer to cook... That’s not really a
sustainable practice,” added Clouette.

When asked whether the Occupy Wall Street protest would be able to
without the kitchen, Clouette said, “I think the whole shape of the
thing would probably change. Part of the occupation of Zuccotti Park
is dependant on certain types of provisions, medical attendance, food,
sometimes a comfort station.”

Reading journal 3: Cynicism vs. Healthy Skepticism

(*Sorry, I forgot to post last week, but I figured better late than never!)

Admittedly, I know pretty much nothing about global economics (or really any economics for that matter) but David Brooks’s op-ed in the Times last week, titled “The Lost Decade?” which considers the implications of a possible global financial crash, jumped out at me for some inexplicable reason. I guess it’s a good example of what we talked about in class a few weeks ago, of stories that are written both for experts and novices.

I thought that Brooks’s op-ed, though it could have easily slipped over into cynicism given the depressing nature of the topic, managed to stay “healthily skeptical” by backing up his assertions with specific examples. Brooks doesn’t try to sugarcoat the gloomy economic situation in the least (“The prognosis for next few years is bad with a chance of worse,” he says) but at the same time, he doesn’t just come in and tell us we’re all screwed so we might as well give up, either. For each complaint he lodges (and he has a lot), he offers specific evidence of why and how it has unfolded.

His biggest complaint seems to be with partisan responses to the growing crisis. “To put it in fancy terms, the crisis is an emergent condition — even more terrible than the sum of its parts,” writes Brooks. “Yet the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.” It seems here like Brooks is implying that the politicians are more concerned with sticking to party lines and regurgitating whatever party rhetoric seems faintly applicable, than with intelligently examining the situation and strategizing appropriate solutions.

He calls both parties to blame for this, saying that Democrats are too ready to name increased government spending as the be-all-end-all solution, and Republicans are too ready say the same of cutting taxes, and reducing regulation—neither of which fully addresses the scope of the problem at hand. (“To a man in love with his hammer, every problem requires a nail,” offers Brooks.)

But although Brooks certainly doesn’t hold any punches, and seems to denigrate both parties equally, I think he manages to escape sounding exactly cynical or nihilistic by balancing his own opinions with outside evidence. He includes expert opinions (he references a former deputy Treasury secretary, and quotes a foreign policy professor from Bard College) and also offers solutions of his own (“Simplify the tax code. End corporate taxes and create a consumption tax. Reshape the European Union to make it either more unified or less, but not halfway as it is now...”)

By contrast, I would compare the “skepticism” of Brooks’s article to basically anything/everything on Gawker. I think the main difference is that Gawker’s clout as a blog is basically predicated on being snarky. Even though Gawker definitely covers news stories that are important and relevant in the metropolitan area, (I'm personally a fan and read their site about ten times a day until they installed the new layout) their goal is to entertain readers more than it is to be objective. It's perfectly acceptable for them to be cynical given the specific media niche that they fill, whereas that kind of opinionated bias would never in a million years fly at harder news publications, and given that they're very different kinds of journalism that seems like an okay thing.

Reading Journal 9/14/2011

For this assignment I chose to compare two different concert reviews, the first, a NYT review of the Das Racist show on September 12, and the second, a Star Tribune review of a private Foo Fighters show held yesterday in Minnesota.

The Times piece, “Order Moves In On Chaos, As Rappers Go Legit,” by Jon Caramanica, seems very much like a singular expert’s opinion, which the author makes explicitly clear from the beginning. The basic argument he puts forward in his first few paragraphs, can be summarized in one sentence, “the members of Das Racist are going legit.” Caramanica asserts that Das Racist concerts in the past were frenzied and chaotic spectacles (he calls them “anti-concerts), but that as the band as evolved there’s been a discernable shift in their live performances. Unfortunately (or perhaps not, depending on how much you trust the author), Caramanica doesn’t even attempt to marshal in any outside evidence to back up his claim, but suggests instead that the reader is just going to have to rely on his word. Of their frenetic live shows, Caramanic writes, “It had to be believed to be seen.”

Going forward, Caramanica doesn’t really use any outside sources in this story: he doesn’t speak to any concertgoers to ask what they thought of the performance, interview the members of Das Racist, or even quote past reviews of the hip-hop outfit. What Caramanica does have going for him is an authoritative voice that commands respect from the reader, and he backs this up with strong details from the night of the concert. Caramnica makes the claim, for example, that, “The polyglot group also thrives when toying with its heavily white audience, acknowledging the tensions of inclusion and exclusion.” Here he reinforces that assertion with a comical anecdote from the show: “Midshow Mr. Suri asked the crowd to wish his cousin a happy birthday: ‘Can you various Americans say ‘Divya?’’ The Crowd chuckled, and the D.J. reminded them: ‘W-W-W-White demons.’ Laughs all around.”

I think that in the specific case of music reviews that are written in this style, from the vantage point of an ‘expert’, a lack of outside evidence/opinions can be compensated for if the author really asserts him/herself from the beginning as someone the reader can trust, but again that’s not always easy to do.

By comparison the Star Tribune review “Foo Fighters pick core crowd for apple orchard gig in White Bear Lake” is written in a completely different style. The tone, as one could rightfully assume from the corny headline, is incredibly informal.

The lede is, “The winners didn't know the location until the van came to pick them up. Even 93X's longtime program director Wade Linder -- who will have a lot less friends once they find out he didn't hook them up -- swears he also was kept out of the loop.” In this case, we can tell from the lede that the tone of the article will be very casual, but the focus of the piece is on the experience of the lucky winners who were chosen to attend this intimate concert, not the voice of the author. The author doesn’t even really devote any time to talking about the Foo Fighters as a band, or what their music is like, he really only covers how “cool” the experience was for people who attended.

“"It was such an intimate performance; I was just entranced the whole time," gushed Cool, who sounded even more impressed of what happened afterward. Like when Foo frontman Dave Grohl "photo-bombed" some lucky girls posing for a friend (jumping in the background behind them with his middle finger raised).” While I guess this is a noteworthy detail given the angle of the piece, I’m not particularly impressed with hearing about how Dave Grohl photobombed a couple of teenagers. It’s probably a good thing that the article doesn’t dig much deeper, because based on what I’ve read so far I wouldn’t trust the author farther than I could throw him, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hear his opinions about whether the band’s performance was a departure from past shows, or if they’re continuing to evolve as a band.

Reading Journal 9/7/2011

For our first blog assignment I decided to focus on how different papers and journalists tackle ledes, because they’re one of the most important parts of a news story, and also because I’m not very good at writing them. Ledes are crucial to a story not only because they set the tone for the entire article, but also because they’re responsible for catching the reader’s attention (or not!), and if a reader isn’t interested in your lede they’re not going to bother to read the rest of your story.

What I noticed in a lot of the front page stories from The New York Times throughout the past week, was that although they obviously differed widely in content, many of the ledes they employed shared a similar formula. The author would begin with some kind of an assertion that seemed pretty logical and straightforward, and then immediately either contradict it, or give the reader some version of “but this is what is happening instead...”

An article on the front page of the Times today, begins this way: “DAMASCUS, Syria – As protests broke out across a restive Syria on a recent Sunday, and crowds were dispersed yet again by gunfire that left many dead, the conversation dwelled not on the uprising but rather on nails, along with the choice of polish and hair color and the latest in makeup trends.” I think this is an effective lede because it surprises the reader (we don’t expect an article that begins with news of violence and rebellion to segue into nail polish and makeup), and also sets up the rest of the article.

The story continues on in the next paragraph: “It does not take long to realize that there is a disconnect between Damascus and the rest of Syria.” I really liked the way this author introduced the story, and thought there was a smooth transition from an anecdote about Syrian life, into harder news. My only concern with it was that the bit about the makeup and nail polish could maybe have been perceived by readers as a slightly trivializing introduction into a story, that there really wasn’t anything cute about.

Another article in the Times, below that one, starts off with a similarly structured lede: “Here’s a back-to-school math problem: There are 62 kindegarten seats at the Trinity School this fall, and 756 children wanted them. What percentage made the cut?” The author lets you consider these odds for a second or two before going on: “The answer seems straightforward: 8.2 percent. But private school admissions are hardly straightforward.” Again, I liked how the lede teases the reader with a piece of startling information that grabs their attention, but also sets an appropriate tone for an article which is about changing practices of nepotism at private schools.