Article: No-book library? BiblioTech Is Coming by Joanna Stern, ABC News

http://news.yahoo.com/library-without-books-bibliotech-open-193118588–abc-news-tech.html

I chose this article because it discusses an example of the interesting movement in today’s tech-savvy culture.

It may be assumed that this article was written for an online audience for a few reasons.  First, its hook and point of the article were summed up in a couple sentences. It did not include an anecdote or put a face on the story. Second, it was written in a very conversational tone. It has been commonly said that we live in a fast-paced culture where thanks to the Internet, our attention spans have significantly decreased. This is probably why this article was written this way.

An obvious weakness of this article comes from the lack of sources. In the entire article, only one person was quoted and cited. Although it is an article that features a project that has not yet been built, the article would have been stronger if another source’s voice was heard. Particularly, it would have been nice to hear from a civilian that goes to a traditional library in the same city where the bookless library will be built. Getting the perspective of a librarian would be even better.

I assumed that the point of this article was to showcase the novelty that this electronic library exudes.

Article: Fast Food Linked to Asthma, Eczema in Kids by Lylah M. Alphonse, Yahoo! Shine

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/fast-food-linked-asthma-eczema-kids-144300118.html

For my second article, I really wanted to analyze an article that focused on a health or science topic since I was always curious in the differences in a typical human-interest story and a scientific article. It was then after surfing through the web that I came across a handful of health-related articles that were short in length. I selected this article because I felt that it brought a fresh angle to a topic that is so often reported on. Within the first couple of paragraphs the author cited statistics and findings from a medical journal saying that fast food might put children at risk at developing asthma and eczema.

The reporter of this article chose to open the story with a statement that the audience would relate to: “we’ve all heard of the dangers of fast food…” I find that this type of hook is interesting because it is something that I commonly see in science or health-related articles. My guess for the reasoning is because nowadays, content or information must be catered or relate to the individual on a more personal level in order to compete and hold someone’s attention on the Internet. I find myself reading these types of leads in many online articles.

It is pretty clear that this article is directed at parents. In my opinion, the actual study featured is the strongest aspect of the article. The featured study is one that studied not only focused on thousands of American children, but also focused on children in 51 other countries. The data not only offered a variety, but it stemmed from a large data set; they had entered over 300,000 children onto their study.

I thought the article did a nice job of acknowledging other possibilities for the symptoms, such as food allergies, that scientists believe is the “culprit.” It ended the article nicely with discussing ways for parents to prevent the negative health sym